The best Margarethe von Trotta’s movies
If you love cinema, you will share this ranking of the best Margarethe von Trotta’s movies, although you may have ordered them differently. In any case, we hope you love it and with a little luck discovering a movie that you still don’t know about Margarethe von Trotta.
Beware of a Holy Whore
6.6/10
Tensions between members of a film crew build while they wait for the arrival of the director and star to arrive on location.
Baal
6.4/10
Volker Schlöndorff transposes Bertolt Brecht’s late-expressionist work to latter-day 1969. Poet and anarchist Baal lives in an attic and reads his poems to cab drivers. At first feted and later rejected by bourgeois society, Baal roams through forests and along motorways, greedy for schnapps, cigarettes, women and men: ‘You have to let out the beast, let him out into the sunlight.’ After impregnating a young actress he soon comes to regard her as a millstone round his neck. He stabs a friend to death and dies alone. ‘You are useless, mangy and wild, you beast, you crawl through the lowest boughs of the tree.’
Searching for Ingmar Bergman
6.7/10
A meaningful account of the personal and professional life of the great Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007) that explores his film legacy, with interviews with his closest collaborators and a new generation of filmmakers.
Alida Valli: In Her Own Words
7.9/10
The story of the legendary star Alida Valli through the unpublished words of her letters and diaries, enriching it with other exclusive materials: photographs, family film in 8mm, new interviews with her sons, relatives, friends and collaborators, and much more archive material.
The American Soldier
6.5/10
Ricky returns to Munich from Vietnam and is promptly hired as a contract killer in Fassbinder’s subversive and experimental gangster movie.
Coup de Grâce
6.9/10
A countess loves her brother's Prussian-officer friend in the 1919 Baltic area.
Forbidden Films
6.9/10
Between 1933 and 1945 roughly 1200 films were made in Germany, of which 300 were banned by the Allied forces. Today, around 40 films, called "Vorbehaltsfilme", are locked away from the public with an uncertain future. Should they be re-released, destroyed, or continue to be neglected? Verbotene Filme takes a closer look at some of these forbidden films.
Nuits transparentes
Strolling through France (Roanne, Nice and Carcassonne) with some excursions abroad (Munich, Montreal, New York).
Reel Herstory: The Real Story of Reel Women
7.5/10
Using rare footage and exclusive interviews with filmmakers from all over the globe, "Reel Herstory" corrects the historic notion that women behind the scenes in motion pictures held peripheral careers compared with their male counterparts.
A Free Woman
6.9/10
A divorced woman in her thirties fights a losing battle in Munich to attain belated self-fulfillment. The die is cast in a briskly impersonal society geared to male dominance and early training for career women.
Calling the Shots
7.2/10
Documentary about women in the film industry. Interviews with directors, producers, writers, and actors include Karen Arthur, Lizzie Borden, Joyce Chopra, Martha Coolidge, Donna Deitch, Ann Hui, Euzhan Palcy, Agnès Varda, Margarethe von Trotta, Anne Wheeler, Sandy Wilson, Mai Zetterling
Desaster
Directed by Reinhard Hauff
Hands Up!
6.5/10
The reunion of a group of former medical students results in a flood of bitter memories.
Gods of the Plague
6.4/10
A man is released from prison and finds the society on the outside less than appealing. With several women as well as the police on his tail, he sets out to find an old friend.
Beer Chase
6.4/10
A man who is dissatisfied with his senseless existence in his family-life and social status steals the uniform of a policeman and then enters the Oktoberfest. Now he is somebody, he is important, he can help, people respect him, etc. His wife, other relatives and some friends start to follow him while he gets some new acquaintances. (IMDB review)
Gian Luigi Rondi - Vita, cinema, passione
Brandstifter
6.8/10
A drama set in Cologne’s revolutionary circles of the late 1960s.
Sympathisanten - Unser deutscher Herbst
6.3/10
West Germany in the 1970s. Many artists, journalists and intellectuals were branded as sympathizers of Baader-Meinhof's left-wing terrorism. The parents of the director, too: Margarethe von Trotta and his stepfather, Volker Schlöndorff. With extensive archive materials and film clips as well as Margarethe von Trotta's private diaries the film portrays one German family and the society of the time.
Une Invitation à la Chasse
6.9/10
Claude Chabrol film for TV based on the short story An Invitation to the Hunt by Georges Hitchcock. Receiving an unexpected invitation to participate in the annual hunt party given by the local marquis, a common man deludes himself into thinking he’s a valued member of society, gets in debt to live up to his own fantasies, puts on airs, and invents a perfectly untrue—but, to his mind, fitting—past for a man of his new station. Then the cruel game starts.
The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach
7/10
An intriguing Hans Christian Anderson-style fairy tale aesthetic and voice over narration. Sudden Wealth is a despairing chronicle of a group of starving peasants who finally seize governmental wealth like a dysfunctional group of Robin Hood's Merry Men, only to be betrayed by their inescapable selves and systematically dehumanized (think bucolic Orwell) and reprogrammed by what we'll put under the rubric of God and Country.
