2024 - 69th Edition

Marianne And Juliane

Die bleierne Zeit

Las hermanas alemanas

Margarethe von Trotta

Germany

- 1981

Margarethe von Trotta's films perfectly embody the idea that the personal is political. Her focus on real (Hannah Arendt, Rosa Luxemburg) and fictional (The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum) female characters imbues her work with a strong feminist claim. In Marianne and Juliane, the director tells the story of two sisters who, in the times of the Baader-Meinhof, are united by the same political struggle but differ in the means they choose to pursue it. While Marianne opts for peaceful activism as a journalist, Juliane subscribes to the radical violence of the Red Army Faction. Two forms of resistance are confronted by the filial love and complicity that each feels for the other. Inspired by the real lives of Christiane and Gudrun Ensslin, Marianne and Juliane is a complex portrait of femininities outside the normative and, at the same time, a critical examination of Germany's political past.

Margarethe von Trotta

She was born in Berlin (Germany) in 1942 and studied German and Romance Philology in Munich and Paris. She worked as an actress for Fassbinder and Herbert Achternbusch, among others, and as a screenwriter with her husband, Volker Schlondorff, in addition to co- directing with him ‘The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum’ (1975), screened at the 21st edition of the Valladolid Festival. Already as a solo filmmaker, she directed films such as ‘Rosa Luxemburg’ (1986, best actress at Cannes) or ‘Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen’ (2009). Awarded at the 2022 European Film Awards for her entire career, she won the Golden Lion in Venice in 1981 for ‘Marianne & Juliane’ and the Volpi Cup for best actress in 2003 for ‘Rosenstrasse’. In 2012 she won the Silver Spike at the 57th Seminci with ‘Hannah Arendt’ and in 2018 she presented ‘Searching for Ingmar Bergman’, her first documentary, at Cannes.

O.V. in German, Italian with English and Spanish subtitles