Fear of Rain

Sep 30, 2014 — When we first released Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul in 2003, we asked filmmaker Todd Haynes to provide a video introduction. The year before, he had released his masterful Far from Heaven, a reworking of Douglas Sirk’s...

Sep 29, 2003 — Fassbinder had long dreamed of a “German Hollywood film.” He sought not only success with the audience, but also professionalism. The auteur film in its purest form is an attempt to abolish the division of labor: the filmmaker represents in...

Feb 10, 2017 — Did You See This? The BFI ruminates on ten masterful portraits of loneliness, including Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring, David Lean’s Summertime, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express. For Eye on Design, Emily Gosling...

Aug 27, 2020 — Writer, director, editor, and coproducer Sandoval stars as an undocumented Filipina drawn into a relationship with an unstable man.

Jul 31, 2019 — Check out what’s in store next month on our streaming service!

Jan 15, 2019 — In Notorious (1946), love assumes different shapes and presentations—as a wound, a weapon, a promise, a curse. For Ingrid Bergman as the lusciously complex and raw-nerved Alicia Huberman, it’s all these things. As the film begins, Alicia is on the...

Jul 8, 2018 — “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians” takes the top prize.

Aug 24, 2017 — Professor Jeff Smith illustrates how, under the constraints of a low budget and compressed shooting schedule, Rainer Werner Fassbinder arrived at a minimalist approach that blended seamlessly with his subject matter.

Feb 21, 2012 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s only work of science fiction, World on a Wire (1973) is surely one of the most obscure items among the forty-odd titles that constitute his filmography. Originally a two-part miniseries broad­cast on West German television, it had...

With themes of love, suffering, betrayal, sacrifice, and redemption, melodrama puts its audiences through the emotional wringer.