Born in Georgenthal, Thuringia, at the very end of the Second World War in Germany, Werner Schroeter spent most of his childhood between Bielfield and Heidelberg. His education was interrupted intermittently by periods of international travel during which time he occasionally attended German schools in foreign countries, finally completing his high school education in Heidelberg.

These periods of international travel may have inspired the many foreign locations he later chose for his films: Naples and Palermo in Italy, Paris, Nancy and Marseille in France, Mexico, Portugal, Lebanon, The Philippines and the Mojave desert in the USA. His command of foreign languages - French, English, Italian - too might well have been made possible less through his education than by his childhood travels of the world.

After leaving school, Schroeter enrolled at the University of Mannheim to study Psychology, but completed only three semesters. After abandoning his university studies, Schroeter worked intermittently as a freelance journalist before enrolling at the Film and Television School in Munich where he remained for only a few weeks.

In 1972, he began his career as a theater and opera director, staging Oscar Wilde's Salomé (1973), Victor Hugo's Lucrezia Borgia (1974), August Strindberg's Mademoiselle Julie (1977) and Richard Wagner's Lohengrin (1979). Along with Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schloendorff, Schroeter is considered one of the leading lights of the New German Cinema of the 1970s.

His films, mostly shot in 16mm, combine an intense interest and knowledge of German history and personal dramatic and emotional investigations. Malina, which stars Isabel Hubber,t is one of the great classics of modern cinema and deals with a perpetually burning apartment, a crazed love affair, and the definitions of the soul.