The Marriage of Maria Braun

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun (German: Die Ehe der Maria Braun) won Hanna Schygulla the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the 1979 Berlin International Film Festival — the role that established her as one of the most internationally recognised German screen presences of the postwar generation, and the first major recognition for the long Schygulla-Fassbinder collaboration that had begun with Love Is Colder Than Death in 1969.

The film is the first of Fassbinder's BRD-Trilogie (Federal Republic of Germany trilogy), which would continue with Lola (1981) and Veronika Voss (1982). The trilogy was conceived as a single project examining the postwar reconstruction of West Germany — the Wirtschaftswunder of the 1950s — through three female leads in distinct economic positions. The Marriage of Maria Braun, the first panel, is widely treated as the centrepiece of Fassbinder's mature work and one of the foundational texts of New German Cinema.

The cast pairs Schygulla with Klaus Löwitsch, Ivan Desny, Gisela Uhlen, Elisabeth Trissenaar and George Byrd. Cinematography is by Michael Ballhaus, who would shortly emigrate to the United States to work with Martin Scorsese on After Hours, Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence and many others. The score is by Peer Raben, Fassbinder's regular composer. Fassbinder died in 1982 at thirty-seven, having directed over forty features in fourteen years; the BRD trilogy is widely considered the apex of that body of work. Sight & Sound returned the film to its 2022 Greatest Films of All Time list.