The Fassbinder Foundation Inc., New York

The Fassbinder Foundation, Inc.(FF)’s mission is to promote, foster, sponsor and encourage the art of film, theater and songwriting in the United States through the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

The FF, Inc. was registered on December 8, 1998 in the State of New York and is a not-for-profit corporation under section 402 of the Non-For-Profit Corporation Law.

The Board of Directors of The Fassbinder Foundation, Inc. consists of the following members:

Juliane Lorenz, President
Laurence Kardish, Secretary
Juliane Camfield, Treasurer

The Members of the Advisory Board are (as of October 2005)

Mary-Lea Bandy † (Chief Curator/Deputy Director, Dept. of Film and Video, MoMA, NY, NY)
Peter Bogdanovich (Filmmaker, Writer, Critic, NY, NY)
Bruce Jenkins (Curator, Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge, MA)
Edith Kramer (Curator and Director of Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA)
Wendy Keys (Director of Spring Gala, The Film Society of Lincoln Center, NY, NY)
Verena Lueken (Senior Film Editor, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Frankfurt am Main, Germany)
Eric Rentschler (Film Scholar and Chairman, Dept. of Germanic Languages & Literatures, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA)
Bob Rosen (Dean, The School of Theater & Television, University of California, Los Angeles, CA)
Armin Mueller-Stahl (Actor, Writer, Painter / Artist, Los Angeles, CA)
Susan Sontag † (Essayist, Novelist, Author, Filmmaker, NY, NY)
David Sterritt (Film Critic of The Christian Science Monitor and Professor of Films, W.C. Post College, Long Island University, NY)
Barbara Sukowa (Actress, Singer, NY, NY)
John Waters (Filmmaker, Baltimore, MD)

Address:

The Fassbinder Foundation Inc.
289 E. 7 Street
Brooklyn, NY 11218

History

The FF, Inc. is an independent not-for-profit entity funded in part by the German Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation (RWFF). The RWFF was founded in 1986 by Fassbinder’s mother, Liselotte Eder, in Munich and entrusted in 1991 to Juliane Lorenz, Fassbinder´s editor and last companion, now the heir of his estate. Since 1992 the RWFF has been based in Berlin. Its permanent mission is to maintain and promote the extraordinarily rich legacy of the late artist.

The RWFF has adopted the following goals:

to administer the rights Fassbinder held as producer, writer, director and/or playwright
to acquire complete rights to films Fassbinder did not himself own or which were only partially owned
to preserve and restore original film materials
to establish an archive
The RWFF holds the estate of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and draws its funding from it.

The RWFF’s most memorable achievement to date was the 1992 Fassbinder Retrospective in the Exhibition tower at Alexanderplatz in Berlin commemorating the 10th anniversary of his death. RWFF sponsors the Discovery of the Year-Fassbinder Award, which has been presented since 1997 during the annual European Academy Award ceremony.

First contacts with the Dept.of Film & Video at The Museum of Modern Art in New York were established in 1993. This very fruitful collaboration culminated in a North American tour of Fassbinder’s entire film oeuvre in 1997/1998. The enormous response to this American and Canadian retrospective led to the creation of the foundation based in the United States.