Shining a light on Hannah Arendt.

• Author: Rampell, Ed
• Position: Interview

In 1981, director Margarethe von Trotta scored five awards at the Venice Film Festival for Marianne and Juliane, including the prestigious Golden Lion. She was immediately hit with an odd question.

"The first interviewer came up to me and said, 'How do you feel to be the first woman since Leni Riefenstahl to win this prize?'" she recalls.

The comparison couldn't have been more inapt. Even though the Berlin-born von Trotta is German like Riefenstahl, there's a world of difference between the propagandist known as "Hitler's favorite filmmaker" and von Trotta, whose movie mission is to reveal the truth about Germany, past and present.

Since 1975, von Trotta's probing lens has shined a light on historical and contemporary figures who tend to otherwise be marginalized. In particular, von Trotta's cinematic specialty is focusing on extraordinary women.

"I'm a woman," she says. "And there aren't so many women making films in the world. When I started, there were very few. So I had the feeling I had to speak for women, because who knows women better than a woman? And who gives them justice?"

Born in 1942, von Trotta insists on confronting postwar Germany's collective amnesia.

"I went to school, and our generation didn't hear about the past in the '50s or even the '60s," she recalls. "It was very late when our parents started to speak about this period. We knew there was something terrible in the past. But we didn't know exactly what happened."

One of her films, Rosenstrasse, unearthed the heroic real life saga of German wives who successfully protested the imprisonment of their Jewish husbands in 1943 Berlin. "For over sixty years, a story was left untold, of a moment left unknown," says the narrator of the trailer. So von Trotta told the story.

Von Trotta was an actress from 966 to 1984, appearing in several early 70s films directed by Rainier Werner Fassbinder and by her then-husband, Volker Schlondorff. One of Fassbinder's favorite actresses, Barbara Sukowa, has portrayed six of von Trotta's controversial characters, and plays the title role in Hannah Arendt.

Von Trotta gushes that Sukowa "is the most intelligent actress I know--very, very talented and so precise." She first directed Sukowa in 1981'S Marianne and Juliane, which was inspired by German ultraleft terrorism (also a theme of von Trotta's directorial debut, 1975's. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, co-directed with Schlondorff).

In 1986, Sukowa portrayed the lead character in von...