Ruth is the wife of well-heeled corsetry manufacturer Erich Halbfass. As business booms, Erich lives frivolously and their daughter Aglaia attends school. The bored middle-class wife begins a secret affair with Aglaia's drawing teacher, setting murder and manslaughter in motion.

The heart of the legs.

At the Paris Theater, an uncommonly engrossing and wise new German movie, "A Free Woman," records the losing battle a divorced woman in her thirties fights in Munich to attain belated self-fulfillment. The die is cast in a briskly impersonal society geared to male dominance and early training for career women. This attractive, capable young woman, needing love and encouragement, determinedly sidesteps her former slot of housewife, studies voice and dance, takes on subordinate jobs and painfully maneuvers with her former husband (a cold fish who shrewdly remarries) for child custody. All this is quietly and beautifully projected by an unobtrusive camera and stunningly personified by the feeling, low-key performance of Margarethe von Trotta in the central role. The blond star also happens to be the wife of the gifted director, Volker Schlondorff, as well as his co-screen writer. They and the other performers and contributors have forged a fine, thoughtful and stimulating film that observantly mirrors a human condition, the traditional subordination of women with truthful, biting irony. It would be hard to find a more persuasive and appealing proponent of feminism than Mrs. Schlondorff.

West Germany in the 1970s. Many artists, journalists and intellectuals were branded as sympathizers of Baader-Meinhof's left-wing terrorism. The parents of the director, too: Margarethe von Trotta and his stepfather, Volker Schlöndorff. With extensive archive materials and film clips as well as Margarethe von Trotta's private diaries the film portrays one German family and the society of the time

A complete and never-before-seen portrait of the life of a young girl from Pula (Istria) who quickly became one of the most famous and beloved actresses of Italian and international cinema, told through the words of her unpublished letters and diaries, photographs, homemade films in 8 mm, and new interviews with her relatives, friends, and collaborators.

2014 film by Felix Moeller

Volker Schlöndorff transposes Bertolt Brecht’s late-expressionist work to latter-day 1969. Poet and anarchist Baal lives in an attic and reads his poems to cab drivers. At first feted and later rejected by bourgeois society, Baal roams through forests and along motorways, greedy for schnapps, cigarettes, women and men: ‘You have to let out the beast, let him out into the sunlight.’ After impregnating a young actress he soon comes to regard her as a millstone round his neck. He stabs a friend to death and dies alone. ‘You are useless, mangy and wild, you beast, you crawl through the lowest boughs of the tree.’ The film takes youthful impetuousness and hatred of oppression as its subject and also ponders the cult of genius and sexual morals. Rainer Werner Fassbinder simultaneously plays both Baal and himself and is surrounded by many actors who were later to perform in his own films. After the film was broadcast on West German television, Brecht’s widow Helene Weigel prohibited any further screenings, arguing that the social circumstances engendering Baal’s rebelliousness had not been adequately explained.

Ricky returns to Munich from Vietnam and is promptly hired as a contract killer.

After his release from prison, ex-convict Franz Walsch finds his way back into the Munich criminal underworld. His attentions focus upon two women, Joanna and Margarethe, as well as upon Günther, his friend who earlier shot his brother.

2018 film by Margarethe von Trotta, Felix Moeller