Margarethe von Trotta

Margarethe von Trotta
von Trotta in 2007
Born	(1942-02-21) 21 February 1942 (age 75) Berlin, Germany
Occupation	Film director, screenwriter, actress
Years active	1968 - present
Spouse(s)	(First Husband) 1964-1968 (one son) Volker Schlöndorff 1971-1991

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."

Von Trotta has been called "the world’s leading feminist filmmaker." The predominant aim of her films is to create new representations of women. Her films are concerned with relationships between and among women (sisters, best friends, etc.), as well as with relationships between women and men, and involve political setting. Nevertheless, she rejects the suggestion that she makes "women’s films".

The child of Elisabeth von Trotta and painter Alfred Roloff, she was born in Berlin and relocated to Paris in the 1960s, where she worked for film collectives, collaborating on scripts and co-directing short films.

In her early career, von Trotta was an actress, appearing in notable films of directors Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schlöndorff. In one of many interviews, von Trotta said: "I came from Germany before the New Wave, so we had all these silly movies. Cinema for me was entertainment, but it was not art. When I came to Paris, I saw several films of Ingmar Bergman, and all of the sudden I understood what cinema could be. I saw the films of Alfred Hitchcock and the French Nouvelle Vague. I stood there and said, ‘that is what I’d like to do with my life.’ But that was 1962, and you couldn’t think that a woman could be a director. In a way, as an unconscious act, I started acting and when the New German films started, I tried to get in through acting." Through her acting career, von Trotta was able to create an initial name for herself before becoming a director.