← In a Year with 13 Moons
In a Year with 13 Moons poster

In a Year with 13 Moons · reception & legacy

1978 · Rainer Werner Fassbinder

How In a Year with 13 Moons has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

Seen on release as almost unwatchably bleak even by Fassbinder standards, it's since climbed to the top tier of his forty-odd films — now routinely named alongside Berlin Alexanderplatz and the BRD Trilogy as his most personal masterpiece.

What's debated

The live debate is whether it's one of cinema's most compassionate portraits of a trans woman or a film that could only imagine her story as tragedy — a tension trans critics and cinephiles still argue over in good faith.

Its footprint

Its slaughterhouse sequence is one of the most notorious and endlessly discussed passages in art cinema — the scene people warn each other about before a first watch.

Where it stands

A 'devastating masterpiece' fixture of Fassbinder rankings and Letterboxd's saddest-films lists — the deep cut cinephiles cite to prove they've gone past Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.

★ Did you know? Fassbinder made it in the raw aftermath of his lover Armin Meier's suicide in 1978, and in his grief did nearly everything himself — writing, directing, editing, production design, and, unusually for him, serving as his own cinematographer.