• Home
• People
• Margarethe von Trotta

Margarethe von Trotta

Margarethe von Trotta (born 21 February 1942) is a German film director who has been referred to as a "leading force" of the New German Cinema movement. She boasts an impressive body of work that has won her awards all over the world in the last forty years. She was married to and collaborated with director Volker Schlöndorff. Although they made a successful team, von Trotta felt she was seen as secondary to Schlöndorff. She responded by making a solo career for herself and becoming "Germany’s foremost female film director, who has offered the most sustained and successful female variant of Autorenkino in postwar German film history." Von Trotta’s work has been compared to Ingmar Bergman’s features from the 1960s and '70s. She says that it was thanks to Bergman's films that she "‘fell in love’ with the medium and its possibilities for representing inner psychic worlds."Von Trotta is also regarded as "the world’s leading feminist filmmaker." The predominant aim of her films is to create new representations of women. Unlike some other female filmmakers in Germany, her films are more concerned with "feminine aesthetics" than with an overt exploration of "political action". The connections between women in her work are serious and, it has been suggested, "tortured." Nevertheless, she rejects the suggestion that she makes "women’s films".