Margarethe von Trotta

Short Biography

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. Von Trotta 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. Subsequently, she established a solo career for herself and became "Germany’s foremost female film director, who has offered the most sustained and successful female variant of Autorenkino in postwar German film history." Certain aspects of von Trotta’s work have been compared to Ingmar Bergman’s features from the 1960s and 1970s. 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."