Margarethe von Trotta kicked off her career as an actress, but the trailblazer is best known for her work as a feminist director. The influential German filmmaker is set to receive a lifetime achievement honor for “extraordinary service to German cinema” at the 2019 German Film Awards May 3 in Berlin. The Hollywood Reporter confirmed the news.
As the source notes, von Trotta is associated with “portraits of often-overlooked heroines of German history. They ranged from communist leader Rosa Luxemburg to the medieval saint Hildegard von Bingen; from the philosopher Hannah Arendt to the women whose civil protest in Berlin’s Rosenstrasse in 1943 prevented the deportation of their Jewish husbands to concentration camps.” She has over two dozen directing credits, “Hannah Arendt,” “‘Rosenstrasse,” and “Rosa Luxemburg” among them. She most recently helmed “Searching for Ingmar Bergman,” a tribute to the late filmmaker that premiered at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.
“In a time when women were rarely allowed to direct, Margarethe von Trotta said: ‘I can do that!’ For that alone she’s earned her fame and honor,” said Ulrich Matthes, president of the German film academy. “And she could do it. In all these years she’s given us some of the most intense female figures in German cinema.”
Asked about the “power of new media in the revolutionary possibilities of bringing people together for good causes,” von Trotta said, “For me it’s like the fight I did from the ’70s with my other female colleagues. We fought for so many years to get the same rights in filmmaking that men had or still have,” she explained. “We got attention and all of a sudden our male colleagues said, ‘yes, yes, we have to understand and help the women to get their rights.’ And then came the backlash. Then all of a sudden it was silent, and it was just as if we didn’t speak before. This #MeToo wave is much bigger,” she observed, “and I like this new movement, but I really fear there will come a backlash again. It’s perhaps this way with every movement: it helps us to go a little bit further. But it will not be the end of the fight,” she emphasized.
Von Trotta revealed, “I’m too old to have that hope anymore. [Laughs] I have made films for 40 years now, and I did a lot of fighting and I was one of the first women in Germany to make films, and there are many, many more women — but there are not enough.”
When we asked von Trotta her advice for other women filmmakers, she said, “Perseverance. Have confidence in your ideas, your talent, and your capacities even if nobody follows you. Stay patient and persevere.”
