Sightlines · reception
How In a Year with 13 Moons was received
1978 · Rainer Werner Fassbinder · In a Year with 13 Moons on Sightlines
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.