Directors ★ Schaufensterpuppen

1. Ulrich Seidl

Producer | Rimini

Ulrich Seidl was born on November 24, 1952 in Vienna, Austria. He is a producer and director, known for Rimini (2022), Paradise: Love (2012) and Goodnight Mommy (2014). He is married to Veronika Franz. They have two children.

2. Lucio Fulci

Writer | Lo squartatore di New York

Lucio Fulci, born in Rome in 1927, remains as controversial in death as he was in life. A gifted craftsman with a sharp tongue and a wicked sense of dark humor, Fulci achieved some measure of notoriety for his gore epics of the late 1970s and early 1980s, but respect was long in coming.

Abandoning ...

3. Jean-Pierre Melville

Writer | Le samouraï

The name "Melville" is not immediately associated with film. It conjures up images of white whales and crackbrained captains, of naysaying notaries and soup-spilling sailors. It is the countersign to a realm of men and their deeds, both heroic and villainous. It is the American novel, with its ...

4. Goran Markovic

Director | Sabirni centar

The son of actors Rade Markovic and Olivera Markovic, between 1965 and 1970 he studied film directing in Prague and then started working for television, directing documentaries and about fifty tv movies. His first theatrical feature was the critically acclaimed and financially successful Special ...

5. Dino Risi

Director | Il sorpasso

Dino Risi became a movie director by chance. In 1940 he met Alberto Lattuada at a friend's boutique. Lattuada told him they needed an assistant director for the movie Piccolo mondo antico (1941). Risi accepted just for fun, not for work. Later, he became a psychiatrist and wrote some articles for a...

6. Mario Bava

Cinematographer | Ecologia del delitto

Italian director Mario Bava was born on July 31, 1914 in the coastal northern Italian town of Sanremo. His father, Eugenio Bava (1886-1966), was a cinematographer in the early days of the Italian film industry. Bava was trained as a painter, and when he eventually followed his father into film ...

7. David Lynch

Writer | Twin Peaks

Born in precisely the kind of small-town American setting so familiar from his films, David Lynch spent his childhood being shunted from one state to another as his research scientist father kept getting relocated. He attended various art schools, married Peggy Lynch and then fathered future ...

8. Luigi Bazzoni

Director | Di domenica

Luigi Bazzoni was born on June 25, 1929 in Salsomaggiore Terme, Emilia-Romagna, Italy. He was a director and writer, known for Di domenica (1963), The Possessed (1965) and The Fifth Cord (1971). He died on March 1, 2012 in Salsomaggiore Terme, Emilia-Romagna, Italy.

9. Roman Polanski

Director | Chinatown

Roman Polanski is a Polish film director, producer, writer and actor. Having made films in Poland, Britain, France and the USA, he is considered one of the few truly international filmmakers. Roman Polanski was born in Paris in 1933.

His parents returned to Poland from France in 1936, three years ...

10. Herman Yau

Director | Chak dan juen ga 2

Herman Yau was born in 1961 in Guangzhou, China. He is a director and cinematographer, known for Shock Wave 2 (2020), Jing xin dong po (2004) and Shock Wave (2017).

11. Srdjan Karanovic

Writer | Petrijin venac

Srdjan Karanovic was born on November 17, 1945 in Belgrade, Serbia, Yugoslavia [now Serbia]. He is a writer and director, known for Petrijin venac (1980), Fragrance of Wild Flowers (1977) and Virgina (1991).

12. Raúl Ruiz

Director | La Telenovela Errante

Chilean director Raúl, or Raoul, Ruiz (1941-2011) was one of the most exciting and innovative filmmakers to emerge from 1960s World Cinema, providing more intellectual fun and artistic experimentation, shot for shot, than any filmmaker since Jean-Luc Godard. A guerrilla who uncompromisingly ...

13. Kaneto Shindô

Writer | Ichimai no hagaki

Kaneto Shindô was born on April 22, 1912 in Hiroshima, Japan. He was a writer and director, known for Postcard (2010), The Naked Island (1960) and A Last Note (1995). He was married to Nobuko Otowa and Miyo Shindo. He died on May 29, 2012 in Hiroshima, Japan.

14. Konstantin Lopushanskiy

Director | Gadkie lebedi

Konstantin Lopushanskiy was born on June 12, 1947 in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukrainian SSR, USSR [now Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine]. He is a director and writer, known for The Ugly Swans (2006), Visitor of a Museum (1989) and Dead Man's Letters (1986).

15. Narciso Ibáñez Serrador

Writer | ¿Quién puede matar a un niño?

Narciso Ibáñez Serrador was born on July 4, 1935 in Montevideo, Uruguay. He was a writer and director, known for Who Can Kill a Child? (1976), The House That Screamed (1969) and Historias para no dormir (1966). He was married to Adriana Gardiazábal and Diana Nauta. He died on June 7, 2019 in Madrid...

16. Pupi Avati

Writer | Gli amici del bar Margherita

Pupi Avati was born on November 3, 1938 in Bologna, Emilia-Romagna, Italy. He is a writer and director, known for Gli amici del bar Margherita (2009), Giovanna's Father (2008) and The Story of Boys & Girls (1989). He has been married to Amelia Turri since 1964. They have three children.

17. Sergio Leone

Writer | Once Upon a Time in America

Sergio Leone was virtually born into the cinema - he was the son of Roberto Roberti (A.K.A. Vincenzo Leone), one of Italy's cinema pioneers, and actress Bice Valerian. Leone entered films in his late teens, working as an assistant director to both Italian directors and U.S. directors working in ...

18. Shozin Fukui

Director | 964 Pinocchio

Shozin Fukui is known for 964 Pinocchio (1991), Rubber's Lover (1996) and Den-Sen (2006).

19. Djordje Kadijevic

Director | Praznik

Djordje Kadijevic was born on January 6, 1933 in Sibenik, Croatia, Yugoslavia. He is a director and writer, known for Praznik (1967), A Holy Place (1990) and Pukovnikovica (1972).

20. Ruggero Deodato

Director | Deathcember

Ruggero Deodato was born on May 7, 1939, in Potenza, Italy, and grew up outside Rome. One of his close friends at the time was Renzo Rossellini, the son of famed Italian director Roberto Rossellini. Knowing Ruggerio's love for the movies, Renzo persuaded him to work as a second unit director on ...

21. George A. Romero

Writer | Land of the Dead

George A. Romero never set out to become a Hollywood figure; by all indications, though, he was very successful. The director of the groundbreaking "Living Dead" films was born February 4, 1940 ,in New York City to Ann (Dvorsky) and Jorge Romero. His father was born in Spain and raised in Cuba, and...

22. David Cronenberg

Actor | The Fly

David Cronenberg, also known as the King of Venereal Horror or the Baron of Blood, was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in 1943. His father, Milton Cronenberg, was a journalist and editor, and his mother, Esther (Sumberg), was a piano player. After showing an inclination for literature at an early...

23. Zoltán Fábri

Director | Húsz óra

He was born in 1917 and between the two World War he finished his primary and secondary school. After them he graduated in the College of Fine Arts, which helped him later to be a production-designer. He liked to learn and joined the Academy of Theatre and Film Arts. He bacame a director and actor....

24. Giulio Questi

Director | Giocare

Giulio Questi was born on March 18, 1924 in Bergamo, Lombardy, Italy. He was a director and writer, known for Giocare (1957), Amori pericolosi (1964) and Plucked (1968). He was married to Marilù Carteny. He died on December 3, 2014 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.

25. Jörg Buttgereit

Director | Lexx

Jörg Buttgereit was born on December 20, 1963 in Berlin, West Germany. He is a director and writer, known for Lexx (1996), Captain Berlin versus Hitler (2009) and Nekromantik (1988).

26. Shin'ya Tsukamoto

Actor | Tetsuo

Shin'ya Tsukamoto was born on January 1, 1960 in Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan. He is an actor and director, known for Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), Vital (2004) and Tokyo Fist (1995).

27. Peter Greenaway

Director | The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover

Peter Greenaway trained as a painter and began working as a film editor for the Central Office of Information in 1965. Shortly afterwards he started to make his own films. He has produced a wealth of short and feature-length films, but also paintings, novels and other books. He has held several ...

28. Gerald Kargl

Director | Angst

Gerald Kargl born 1953 in Villach, Austria, is a writer and director, famous for the psycho-thriller "Angst" (1983). Kargl started experimenting with the film camera when he was 14. This resulted in a large number of short films. Between 1976 and 1982 he founded and organized the Austrian film ...

29. David Schmoeller

Director | Little Monsters

Raised and educated in Texas, David Schmoeller began his career as a young playwright and was awarded the Texas Good Neighbor Scholarship for studies in Mexico, attending the Universidad De Las Americas from 1967-1968. In Mexico he studied theater with Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo (1970)) and was ...

30. Nacho Cerdá

Director | Genesis

Nacho Cerdá was born in Catalonia, Spain. He is known for Genesis (1998), The Abandoned (2006) and Aftermath (1994).

31. Shûji Terayama

Writer | Saraba hakobune

Terayama Shuji was born the only son of Terayama Hachiro and Terayama Hatsu in Hirosaki City, Aomori on December 10th, 1935; but his birth and name were officially registered on January 10th, 1936. His father, an officer in the "thought police", leaves for the Pacific War in early 1941. He dies in ...

32. Nobuhiko Ôbayashi

Director | Hausu

Nobuhiko Ôbayashi was born on January 9, 1938 in Onomichi, Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan. He was a director and editor, known for House (1977), Turning Point (1994) and The Discarnates (1988). He was married to Kyôko Ôbayashi. He died on April 10, 2020 in Tokyo, Japan.

33. Andrzej Zulawski

Writer | Possession

Born in Lvov, Ukraine; then he moved with his father Miroslaw Zulawski to Czechoslovakia and later to Poland. In the late 1950s, he studied cinema in France. In the 1960s, he was an assistant of the famous Polish film director Andrzej Wajda. His feature debut The Third Part of the Night (1971) was ...

34. Jean-Pierre Mocky

Director | Litan

As an actor he became popular as Albert de Morcerf in a version of The Count of Monte Cristo (1954), fame and adulation followed with his Francois in Head Against the Wall (1959). As a director he became famous with anarcho-pictures, brilliant cynic comedies. His preferred actors in all decades were...

35. Valie Export

Director | Die Praxis der Liebe

Valie Export was born on May 17, 1940 in Linz, Upper Austria, Austria. She is a director and writer, known for The Practice of Love (1985), Body Tape (1970) and Die süße Nummer: Ein friedliches Konsumerlebnis (1969).

36. Joe D'Amato

Director | Emanuelle e Françoise (Le sorelline)

Joe D'Amato was born Aristide Massaccesi on December 15, 1936, in Rome, Italy. At age 14 he began working for his father, a chief electrician and later the founder of the company A.C.M. By going to school in the daytime, Massaccesi worked afternoons part-time as a stagehand and stage cameraman ...

37. Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Writer | Faustrecht der Freiheit

Above all, Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a rebel whose life and art was marked by gross contradiction. Openly homosexual, he married twice; one of his wives acted in his films and the other served as his editor. Accused variously by detractors of being anticommunist, male chauvinist, antiSemitic and...

38. Umberto Lenzi

Writer | La casa 3

Born in Massa Marittima, Italy on August 6, 1931, Umberto Lenzi was a movie enthusiast since his early grade school years. During those years, he founded various film fan clubs while studying law. Lenzi started out as a journalist for various local newspapers and magazines. Lenzi put off his law ...

39. Dario Argento

Writer | Profondo rosso

Dario Argento was born on September 7, 1940, in Rome, Italy, the first-born son of famed Italian producer Salvatore Argento and Brazilian fashion model Elda Luxardo. Argento recalls getting his ideas for filmmaking from his close-knit family from Italian folk tales told by his parents and other ...

40. Shôhei Imamura

Director | Kuroi ame

Shohei Imamura's films dig beneath the surface of Japanese society to reveal a wellspring of sensual, often irrational, energy that lies beneath. Along with his colleagues Nagisa Ôshima and Masahiro Shinoda, Imamura began his serious directorial career as a member of the New Wave movement in Japan....

41. Walerian Borowczyk

Director | Docteur Jekyll et les femmes

Born in Kwilcz, Poland, Walerian Borowczyk trained as a painter and lithographer, winning Poland's National Prize in 1953. He began his film career as a film poster designer, then started making short animated films in the late 1950s. Moving to France in the early 1960s, he gained a reputation as a...

42. Paolo Cavara

Writer | L'occhio selvaggio

Paolo Cavara was born on July 4, 1926 in Bologna, Emilia-Romagna, Italy. He was a writer and director, known for L'occhio selvaggio (1967), Atsalut pader (1979) and A Dog's Life (1962). He died on August 7, 1982 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.

43. Juraj Herz

Director | Habermann

Juraj Herz was born on September 4, 1934 in Kezmarok, Czechoslovakia [now Slovakia]. He was a director and actor, known for Habermann (2010), The Cremator (1969) and Beauty and the Beast (1978). He was married to Therese Herz. He died on April 8, 2018 in Prague, Czech Republic.

44. Hisayasu Satô

Director | Gekiai! Rorîta mitsuryô

Hisayasu Sato is a Japanese director known best for his work in the pink film industry from the mid-80s to the mid-90s. His best known works are the pink film Unfaithful Wife: Shameful Torture (1992) (1992), and the V-Cinema splatter film Naked Blood (1996) (1996). He is known for his "sledgehammer...

45. Takashi Miike

Director | Jûsan-nin no shikaku

Takashi Miike was born in the small town of Yao on the outskirts of Osaka, Japan. His main interest growing up was motorbikes, and for a while he harbored ambitions to race professionally. At the age of 18 he went to study at the film school in Yokohama founded by renowned director Shôhei Imamura, ...

46. John Carpenter

Writer | The Fog

John Howard Carpenter was born in Carthage, New York, to mother Milton Jean (Carter) and father Howard Ralph Carpenter. His family moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky, where his father, a professor, was head of the music department at Western Kentucky University. He attended Western Kentucky ...

47. Fritz Lang

Actor | Le mépris

Fritz Lang was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1890. His father managed a construction company. His mother, Pauline Schlesinger, was Jewish but converted to Catholicism when Lang was ten. After high school, he enrolled briefly at the Technische Hochschule Wien and then started to train as a painter. ...

48. Ingmar Bergman

Writer | Smultronstället

Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born July 14, 1918, the son of a priest. The film and T.V. series, The Best Intentions (1992) is biographical and shows the early marriage of his parents. The film Sunday's Children (1992) depicts a bicycle journey with his father. In the miniseries Private Confessions (...

49. Tod Browning

Director | Dracula

Belonging to a well-situated family, Charles Browning fell in love at the age of 16 with a dancer of a circus. Following her began his itinerary of being clown, jockey and director of a variety theater which ended when he met D.W. Griffith and became an actor. He made his debut in Intolerance (1916)...

50. Jim Jarmusch

Director | Paterson

Moved to New York City at the age of seventeen from Akron, Ohio. Graduated from Columbia University with a B.A. in English, class of '75. Without any prior film experience, he was accepted into the Tisch School of the Arts, New York.

51. Vincenzo Natali

Director | Cube

Vincenzo Natali was born on January 6, 1969 in Detroit, Michigan, USA. He is a director and producer, known for Cube (1997), In the Tall Grass (2019) and Cypher (2002).

52. Atom Egoyan

Director | The Sweet Hereafter

Born in Egypt to Armenian parents, he was raised in Western Canada. Both his parents were painters, and he planned to be a playwright, but after making a short film, he became hooked on telling stories visually. Returned to ethnic "homeland" when he filmed Calendar (1993) in Armenia. Won attention ...

53. Jan Svankmajer

Director | Otesánek

After studying at the Institute of Industrial Arts and the Marionette Faculty of the Prague Academy of Fine Arts in the 1950s, Jan Svankmajer started working as a theatre director, chiefly in association with the Theatre of Masks and the Black Theatre. He first experimented with film-making after ...

54. Spike Jonze

Producer | Her

Spike Jonze made up one-third (along with Andy Jenkins and Mark Lewman) of the triumvirate of genius minds behind Dirt Magazine, the brother publication of the much lamented ground-breaking Sassy Magazine. These three uncommon characters were all editors for Grand Royal Magazine as well, under the ...

55. Joel Coen

Producer | The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Joel Daniel Coen is an American filmmaker who regularly collaborates with his younger brother Ethan. They made Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, True Grit, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Burn After Reading, A Serious Man, Inside Llewyn Davis, Hail Caesar and other projects. Joel ...

56. Nicolas Roeg

Director | Don't Look Now

When he made his directorial debut in 1970, Nicolas Roeg was already a 23-year veteran of the British film industry, starting out in 1947 as an editing apprentice and working his way up to cinematographer twelve years later. He first came to attention as part of the second unit on David Lean's ...

57. Teruo Ishii

Director | Gensen-Kan Shujin

Teruo Ishii was born on January 1, 1924 in Tokyo, Japan. He was a director and writer, known for Gensen-Kan Inn (1993), Female Yakuza Tale (1973) and The Great Villain's Strategy (1966). He died on August 12, 2005 in Tokyo, Japan.

58. Luis Buñuel

Writer | Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie

The father of cinematic Surrealism and one of the most original directors in the history of the film medium, Luis Buñuel was given a strict Jesuit education (which sowed the seeds of his obsession with both religion and subversive behavior), and subsequently moved to Madrid to study at the ...

59. Jaume Balagueró

Director | [Rec]

Jaume Balagueró was born on November 2, 1968 in Lleida, Lleida, Catalonia, Spain. He is a director and writer, known for REC (2007), Sleep Tight (2011) and The Nameless (1999).

60. Toshio Matsumoto

Director | Dogura magura

Matsumoto was born in Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, Japan and graduated from Tokyo University in 1955. His first short was Ginrin, which he made in 1955. His most famous film is Funeral Parade of Roses, featuring a transvestite trying to move up in the world of Tokyo Hostess clubs. Matsumoto published ...