Important Classic and contemporary European Filmmakers

Only European Directors who born and/or based most of their lives in Europe. Not ranked in any particular order. You may like their films or not but their ouvreurs/films have shaped and defined the history and progress of cinema landscape as we know it.
Not included in this list are legendary directors who moved lately to Hollywood like Hitchcock, Joe May, Ernst Lubitsch, Chaplin, Von Stroheim, Victor Sjöström, Murnau, Sergio Leone, Fritz Lang, Von Sternberg, Mike Nichols, Michael Curtiz, Billy Wilder, Sergio Leone, Elia Kazan, William Wyler, Milos Forman, Fred Zinnemann, Otto Preminger, Jean Renoir, Ivan Passer, Siegmund Lubin...
My other lists:
1. Important Classic and contemporary Asian Filmmakers
2. Important Classic and contemporary Hollywood Filmmakers
3. Important Classic and contemporary South/Middle America Filmmakers
4. Documentaries
5. Animated Short Films
6. Vietnamese Films
1. Lars von Trier
Probably the most ambitious and visually distinctive filmmaker to emerge from Denmark since the great master Carl Theodor Dreyer over 60 years earlier.
2. Nuri Bilge Ceylan
With only several features, the Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan has become one of the most respected names in the european cinema scene, a contemporary master with an attentive, concentrated, slow-burn style all his own.
3. Jean-Luc Godard
A pioneer of the French new wave, Jean-Luc Godard has had an incalculable effect on modern cinema that refuses to wane. He was and always will be our greatest lyricist on historical trauma, religion, and the legacy of cinema.
4. Michael Haneke
Austrian film director and screenwriter, Michael Haneke is one of Europe’s most prominent and controversial auteurs working today. Common themes in Haneke’s dystopian works include discontentment and estrangement experienced by individuals in modern society – namely the European bourgeoisie, the personal suffering and increased disconnection experienced by humankind and the inherent cruelty and violence lying under the surface of modernity. His films are provocative and complex challenges to his audience and rely heavily on his interest in psychology, philosophy, spectatorship, semiotics and violence in the media.
5. Krzysztof Kieslowski
A Polish filmmaker of unparalleled merit whose simple stories deal with difficult, fundamental and universal questions about complex human feelings and their struggling to reconcile daily life with its cultural myths — be they Communist propaganda, Biblical proverbs, or French revolutionary slogans.
6. Theodoros Angelopoulos
Greek film director with a magisterial, dreamy, atmospheric and enigmatic style, whose films explored the human condition in general and the condition of modern Greece in particular through haunting imagery rooted in myth and epic.
7. Michelangelo Antonioni
Italian filmmaker Antonioni "redefined the concept of narrative cinema" and challenged traditional approaches to storytelling, realism, drama, and the world at large. His films are aesthetically complex – critically stimulating though elusive in meaning. With him, Fellini, Bergman, and Resnais, European art-house cinema was brought to a new height.
8. Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Despite what the film critics say, Jeunet has been a great infulence to filmmaking in France and around the world with unique style, quirky sense or humor and fantastic cinematography. His films present the perfection - every object, every movement, every facial expression in every scene has a meaning. Emotions are portrayed in a delicate way which makes the audiences sink in, watching the hilarious story unfold.
9. Ingmar Bergman
One of the reasons one immediately recognises a Bergman film is that he is one of those rare filmmakers who has created his own cinematic world. He himself was hailed by many other legendary filmmakers as the greatest film director of the 20th century.
10. Pedro Almodóvar
As Spain's most famous film director, he's also one of cinema's most visionary directors, and his films have shaped the way we see his country. What is it about him that resonates so profoundly with spectators worldwide? His signature, colorful visual style, his keen awareness of and sensitivity to the issues of women, his audacity when portraying a large cross-section of sexuality in new, thrilling ways...
11. Wim Wenders
Wenders will always stay remain as one of my supreme hero of cinematic world, one of the most noted contemporary auteurs, the driving force behind the "Neuer Deutsche Film". His characters are isolated and emotionally stunted - but when they take to the road, change becomes inevitable. Every single frame were superbly photographed, leisurely odysseys reach metaphysical dimensions, and ipso facto, exposing heartbreaking sadness-induced raw emotion.
12. Werner Herzog
The ultimate man with a life truly stranger than fiction. The German Legacy. He lets nothing get in the way of his passion because in the journey to perfection there is no place for hidden agendas or half-ass mediocrity. Everything has to be burned and fired away. Not only his films are masterpiece, Herzog seems to deliberately make himself hard to pin down, acquiring himself a legendary, almost mythological status in the process.
13. Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a rebel whose life, a rampant drug addict; a wild, self-destructive libertinage but his films are so pure and demonstrate his deep sensitivity to social misfits and his hatred of institutionalized violence. One of the most innovative practitioner of New German Cinema, worked in fourteen years and made forty-four films!
14. Alain Resnais
The cinema pioneer and leader of La Nouvelle Vague (French New Wave), who directed such great masterpieces like "Hiroshima Mon Amour", “Last Year at Marienbad".... I don't have much to say because his name says it all!
15. Jean-Pierre Dardenne
So much of modern cinema is built on visual flourishes and technological gimmicks that it’s easy to forget that the most enthralling special effect of all is the sight of characters moving through space, their body language, facial expressions and mundane actions telling you what they believe and feel. The Belgian filmmaking brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne believe this, and they’ve created a distinctive aesthetic around their conviction. The characters hardly speak but rather let their camera says it all.
16. Fatih Akin
The young director Fatih Akin, born in Germany to Turkish parents became one of the most influential European directors at the moment. Akin consistently casts his probing gaze on the competing forces of these two distinct, but intersect- ing worlds (Germany/Turkey), revealing their resistances and collisions as well with a rich body of works, as their affinities.
17. Gaspar Noé
His films punch you in the face, and they demand a strong stomach. But they are so damn delicious. Like a delicatessen we haven't had before. His three features: I Stand Alone, Irréversible, and Enter The Void are the most prolonged, extravagant experiments we haven't seen in a while, daring us to stay put in the seats. But it worths every single minute of them.
18. Nikita Mikhalkov
Nikita Mikhalkov, the world’s most famous living Russian director, turns 70 on Oct. 21. He has been nominated for the Oscar three times for Best Foreign Film and in 1995 received the award for the film “Burnt by the Sun,” a drama set in the Stalinist era that is often compared to Victor Fleming's 1939 classic “Gone with the Wind.”
19. Cristian Mungiu
Cristian Mungiu, director of the masterful 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. At 44, Mungiu rides the crest of the Romanian New Wave with a modern root from Czech and New German Cinema Wave. He said, "I aim to tell a story about important values by allowing the story to express itself and not impose my own interpretation. My responsibility is to present the situation and [let] the audience interpret it. I don’t think cinema should pre-interpret things for people."
20. Roy Andersson
Roy Andersson just might be one of the most interesting oddballs in the world of film. He demands we pay attention; he refuses to manipulate us with close-ups. And his filmic philosophy is also expressed through lighting. "I want to have light without mercy," he says. "There are no shadows to hide in. You are illuminated all the time. It makes you naked, the human beings — naked."
21. Andrei Tarkovsky
I remember watching my first Tarkovsky's film: "Mirror", a beautiful but complex film. French Philosopher Gaston Bachelard on "Our Paradoxical Experience of Time": If our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail, we would see that every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer. No human invention has rendered this paradox more pliant than the cinema. That’s what the master Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky examined in the the raw material of his art.
22. Thomas Vinterberg
In 1995, a group of Danish film directors, including Thomas Vinterberg and Lars von Trier celebrated the 100th anniversary of cinema with something as anachronistic as signing a manifesto, DOGMA 95. With a mixture of solemnity and irony, they pledged to rescue film from the decadence of individualism and illusion by means of ten rules laid down as a Vow of Chastity. Aimed at undressing film, the rules ban any use of unnecessary ornamentation - and as a result, his films are naked and raw and authentic, in both form and content.
23. Giuseppe Tornatore
There is nothing more italian and sicilian than Tornatore's films. His films touch the soul of Sicily, transcending the ordinary, the conventional, the stereotypical - where he was born and raised.
24. Béla Tarr
When it comes to auteurs who look as if they could be characters in their own movies, the sixty-something-year-old Bela Tarr has to be near the top of the list. The Hungarian director is considered one of the most important filmmakers of his generation. With Sátántangó and The Turin Horse, he has coined a new concept of cinema thanks to a deeply personal design language.
25. Zoltán Fábri
One of the most important directors of the 20th century, a key figure in the development of Hungarian New Cinema. Many of his films are the finest chamber pieces of Hungarian cinema such as: The Fifth Seal, The Unfinished Sentence, Aunts’ Nest, Balint Fabian Meets God, Hungarians, Professor Hannibal...
26. Aki Kaurismäki
Made over 20 films since 1980 including the most beautiful author films of recent years, the ingenuity of Kaurismäki's work lies in its simplicity and quotes Italian neorealism as well as the early films of the French „Nouvelle Vague“. Between Finnish tangos and punk music from his house band „Leningrad Cowboys“ with their characteristic hairstyles, Kaurismäki invented a cinema between cult and poetic realism.
27. Emir Kusturica
Known for methodical work and long postproduction periods, Kusturica directed only two feature films in two decades 2000s and 2010s. Still,born in Sarajevo in 1955, he is the most important director of the former Yugoslavia who was one of the most-distinguished European filmmakers since the mid-1980s, best known for surreal and naturalistic movies that express deep sympathies for people from the margins.
28. Jacques Audiard
Jacques Audiard has always been an outlier in a French film industry that is starkly bifurcated between high and low. Outside the omnipresent influence of Hollywood, there are commercially successful domestic genre films, often comedies so unsalable abroad it is as if they don’t even exist — and less expensive auteur films that an international fraternity of movie buffs and critics do like. Much of the latter would be economically impossible in the absence of significant state subsidies. But Audiard has managed to find a third way, something similar to what Martin Scorsese or the Coen brothers did — that is, distinctive and thought-provoking, plot-driven pictures that play for large audiences at home and be able to penetrate foreign markets.
29. Federico Fellini
One of the greatest directors in international film history, the Italian Federico Fellini created a unique, unmistakable and imaginative oeuvre that uses the term “fellinesque” for grotesque characters in circus-like environments, big-breasted and voluminous women, rich dream worlds and fantasy-like ones Introduced picture sheets with bizarre-strange situations into the language.
30. Jean Cocteau
Jean Cocteau is with 20 in the spotlight, next to Apollinaire, Picasso, Eric Satie. He is a poet and painter, musician, choreographer and actor. He writes novels and poems, works on ballets, paints and makes films.
"I'm not making a film," he said, "I'm writing in pictures". A film is created under Cocteau's hands, fine, delicate, always moving & flowing like a poem, a play, an image. Donors interested in art enable him to see the film as art and not as moneymaker.
31. Roman Polanski
32. Sergei M. Eisenstein
33. Bernardo Bertolucci
34. David Lean
35. Luis Buñuel
36. Tom Tykwer
37. Luc Besson
38. Lina Wertmüller
39. Jean Renoir
40. Jean-Pierre Melville
41. Mike Leigh
42. François Truffaut
43. Dario Argento
44. Roberto Rossellini
45. Vittorio De Sica
46. Terry Gilliam
47. Carl Theodor Dreyer
48. Richard Attenborough
49. Jan Svankmajer
50. Andrzej Wajda
51. Guy Ritchie
52. Leni Riefenstahl
53. Jacques Rivette
54. Robert Wiene
55. Volker Schlöndorff
56. Margarethe von Trotta
57. Peter Greenaway
58. Edgar Reitz
59. Terry Jones
60. Luchino Visconti
61. Sergei Parajanov
62. François Girard
63. Andrey Zvyagintsev
64. Jacques Demy
65. Jean Vigo
66. Albert Lamorisse
67. Lasse Hallström
68. Carol Reed
69. Claude Sautet
70. Éric Rohmer
71. Chris Marker
72. Claude Chabrol
73. Henri-Georges Clouzot
74. René Clément
75. Marcel Carné
76. Georges Méliès
77. Claude Berri
78. István Szabó
79. Gillo Pontecorvo
80. Pier Paolo Pasolini
81. Paolo Taviani
82. Dino Risi
83. Otto Preminger
84. Patrice Leconte
85. Radu Mihaileanu
86. Dziga Vertov
87. Alain Corneau
88. Christophe Barratier
89. Bertrand Tavernier
90. Helmut Käutner
91. Douglas Sirk
92. Mikhail Kalatozov
93. Jacques Becker
94. Marcel Camus
95. Sergey Bondarchuk
96. Lindsay Anderson
97. Anthony Harvey
98. Costa-Gavras
99. Francesco Rosi
100. Víctor Erice
101. Carlos Saura
102. Alan Parker
103. Uli Edel
104. Luc Dardenne
105. Danis Tanovic
106. Jean-Jacques Annaud
107. Stephen Frears
108. John Boorman
109. Frank Beyer
110. Agnès Varda
111. Milcho Manchevski
112. Pawel Pawlikowski
113. Miklós Jancsó
114. Max Ophüls
115. Georg Wilhelm Pabst
116. Ladislao Vajda
117. Michel Gondry
118. Michael Powell
119. Emeric Pressburger
120. Louis Malle
121. Mario Monicelli
122. Julien Duvivier
123. Jacques Feyder
124. Claude Autant-Lara
125. Anthony Asquith
126. Ronald Neame
127. Danny Boyle
128. Aleksandr Sokurov
129. Duncan Jones
130. William K.L. Dickson
131. Alice Guy
132. Jacques Tati
133. Germaine Dulac
134. Marcel L'Herbier
135. Robert Enrico
136. Vsevolod Pudovkin
137. Abel Gance
138. Walter Ruttmann
139. Vera Chytilová
140. Friðrik Þór Friðriksson
141. Konrad Wolf
142. Robert Bresson
143. J. Lee Thompson
144. Erik Balling
145. Susanne Bier
146. Mikko Niskanen
147. Hasse Ekman
148. Bille August
149. Lukas Moodysson
150. Per Fly
151. Louis Lumière
152. Auguste Lumière
153. Jacques Feyder
154. Raoul Ruiz
155. Jean-Jacques Beineix
156. Leos Carax
157. Jaco Van Dormael
158. Peter Watkins
159. Olivier Dahan
160. William Dieterle
161. Oliver Hirschbiegel
162. Dinos Dimopoulos
163. Thodoros Maragos
164. Vittorio Taviani
165. Roberto Benigni
166. Valerio Zurlini
167. Yevgeny Bauer
168. Cecil M. Hepworth
169. Lev Kuleshov
170. Anatole Litvak
171. Sergey Gerasimov
172. Grigoriy Chukhray
173. Artavazd Peleshian
174. Alexander Korda
175. Aleksandar Petrovic
176. Walerian Borowczyk
177. Dusan Makavejev
178. Basil Wright
179. James Whale
180. Nicolas Roeg
181. Anthony Minghella
182. Sam Mendes
183. Paul Greengrass
184. John Schlesinger
185. Louis Feuillade
186. Anatole Litvak
187. Raymond Bernard
188. Benjamin Christensen
189. Robert Siodmak
190. Wladyslaw Starewicz
191. Carl Froelich
192. Boris Barnet
193. Sacha Guitry
194. Alf Sjöberg
195. Jacques Tourneur
196. Laurence Olivier
197. Georges Franju
198. Charles Frend
199. Luis García Berlanga
200. Juan Antonio Bardem
201. Michael Cacoyannis
202. Vadim Abdrashitov
203. Michael Powell
204. Douglas Sirk
205. Martin McDonagh
206. Xavier Koller
207. Wojciech Smarzowski
208. Roland Joffé
209. Roy William Neill
210. Jonathan Lynn
211. Robert Siodmak
212. Alexander Mackendrick
213. Nikola Tanhofer
214. Terence Fisher
215. Roy Ward Baker
216. Jerzy Kawalerowicz
217. Valerio Zurlini
218. Karel Reisz
219. Pietro Germi
220. Ermanno Olmi
221. Tony Richardson
222. Peter Ustinov
223. Bryan Forbes
224. Agnès Varda
225. Francesco Rosi
226. Henri Verneuil
227. Grigoriy Kozintsev
228. Marco Bellocchio
229. Miklós Jancsó
230. Claude Lelouch
231. Volker Schlöndorff
232. Larisa Shepitko
233. Frantisek Vlácilb
234. Claude Berri
235. Sergio Corbucci
236. Maurice Pialat
237. Franco Zeffirelli
238. Juraj Herz
239. Ken Loach
240. Lev Kulidzhanov
241. Karel Kachyna
242. Yilmaz Güney
243. Serif Gören
244. Vladimir Motyl
245. Károly Makk
246. Elio Petri
247. Zoltán Huszárik
248. John Boorman
249. Elisabeta Bostan
250. Jean Eustache
251. Chantal Akerman
252. Ivo Caprino
253. Paul Grimault
254. Bertrand Tavernier
255. Claude Miller
256. René Laloux
256. René Laloux
258. Dusan Kovacevic
259. Michael Radford
260. Elem Klimov
261. Mario Camus
262. Fons Rademakers
263. Jirí Barta
264. Ryszard Bugajski
265. Agnieszka Holland
266. Gianni Amelio
267. Goran Markovic
268. Aleksey Balabanov
269. Pedro Costa
270. Srdjan Dragojevic
271. Shane Meadows
272. Anders Thomas Jensen
273. Michel Ocelot
274. Jean-Xavier de Lestrade
275. Isabel Coixet
276. Oliver Hirschbiegel
277. Max Ophüls
278. Jean Rouch
279. Claude Lanzmann
280. Pavel Lungin
281. Jan Troell
282. Götz Spielmann
283. Carl Boese
284. Paul Wegener
285. Vsevolod Pudovkin
286. Alessandro Blasetti
287. John Boulting
288. Mario Camerini
289. André Cayatte
290. Christian-Jaque
291. Louis Daquin
292. Louis Delluc
293. Giuseppe De Santis
294. Thorold Dickinson
295. Mark Donskoy
296. Aleksandr Dovzhenko
297. Germaine Dulac
298. Jean Epstein
299. Fridrikh Ermler
300. Sidney Gilliat
301. Aleksander Ford
302. Jean Grémillon
303. Iosif Kheifits
304. Rex Ingram
305. Humphrey Jennings
306. Joris Ivens
307. Helmut Käutner
Considered to be one of the most important German directors of the post WWII era.
308. Frank Launder
309. Alberto Lattuada
310. Roger Leenhardt
311. Marcel L'Herbier
312. Manoel de Oliveira
313. Jean Negulesco
314. Marcel Pagnol
315. Yakov Protazanov
316. Yuli Raizman
317. Hans Richter
318. Paul Rotha
319. Georges Rouquier
320. Wolfgang Staudte
321. Mario Soldati
322. Mauritz Stiller
323. Arne Sucksdorff
324. Bert Haanstra
325. Georges Lautner
326. Liviu Ciulei
327. Eldar Ryazanov
328. Péter Bacsó
329. Stanislawa Bareja
330. Gabriele Salvatores
331. Álex de la Iglesia
332. Yavuz Turgul
333. Rezo Chkheidze
334. Zaza Urushadze
335. Tengiz Abuladze
336. Giorgi Shengelaia
337. Eldar Shengelaia
338. João César Monteiro
339. Lina Wertmüller
340. Henri Verneuil
341. Robert Enrico
342. Lone Scherfig
343. Yorgos Lanthimos
344. György Pálfi
345. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
346. Paolo Sorrentino
347. Andrea Arnold
348. Lynne Ramsay
349. Claire Denis
350. René Clair
351. Alain Robbe-Grillet
352. Catherine Breillat
353. Olivier Assayas
354. Isabel Coixet
355. Alejandro Amenábar
356. Alice Rohrwacher
357. Matteo Garrone
358. Joe Wright
359. Terry George
360. Wolfgang Becker
361. Marco Tullio Giordana
362. Caroline Link
363. Paul Verhoeven
364. Abdellatif Kechiche
365. Steve McQueen
366. Laurent Cantet
367. David Mackenzie
368. Maren Ade
369. Laszlo Nemes
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