Margarethe von Trotta's TV movie focuses on a woman whose life is destroyed by her addiction to alcohol. Angela Rinser is a happy mother of two children and quite successful in her job as bilingual secretary. The sudden death of her husband changes everything. She starts drinking and loses her job. Her children Felicitas and Max try to hush up their social decline for years because they don't want to live in a foster home.

A dying woman, who stole her best friend's lover, is convinced that a spell has been cast on her, so she orchestrates her former friend's return from a self-imposed exile in Africa in the hopes of breaking the spell.

1988 film

When Ingeborg Bachmann and Max Frisch meet for the first time in Paris in the summer of 1958, they are already international celebrities of the literary world. In the four years that follow, they dabble in great love and an open relationship between his hometown of Zurich and her adopted Rome.

Sisters Maria and Anna live together. Maria is a most proficient executive secretary, encouraging Anna to finish her studies and start a career. Anna broods, threatens to quit university, takes pills, and keeps a diary. When Maria's relationship with Maurice, the son of her boss, starts to lead to love, Anna takes a selfish and drastic step that plummets Maria into solitude. No longer able to connect with Maurice, Maria does establish a relationship with Miriam, a typist at her office who becomes a surrogate younger sister. But Maria is intrusive as well as helpful. Can this or any relationship work out for this talented woman whose past seems to choke her soul?

Three sisters, played by Fanny Ardant, Greta Scacchi and Valeria Golino, struggle with their illusions, goals and desires in Margarethe von Trotta’s film adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s play.

An early work from the filmmaker behind THE TIN DRUM with an intriguing Hans Christian Anderson-style fairy tale aesthetic and voice over narration. SUDDEN WEALTH is a despairing chronicle of a group of starving peasants who finally seize governmental wealth like a dysfunctional group of Robin Hood's Merry Men, only to be betrayed by their inescapable selves and systematically dehumanized (think bucolic Orwell) and reprogrammed by what we'll put under the rubric of God and Country. Extremely striking compositions at times. Only one man (who bears a passing resemblance to a young John Cleese, incidentally) refuses to go gentle into that good night. The last scene is reminiscent of the endings in both Kubrick's PATHS OF GLORY and THE CRUCIBLE with Day-Lewis, yet all even more chilling with its alienating suddenly reappearing voice-over. SUDDEN WEALTH benefits from an especially strong second half with fuller characterization that makes it come alive as a whole for Schlondorff, whose film's evinces extremely striking compositions at times with stationary camera. Especially recommended for those interested in the New German Cinema.

East-Berlin, 1961, shortly after the erection of the Wall. Konrad, Sophie and three of their friends plan a daring escape to Western Germany. The attempt is successful, except for Konrad, who remains behind. From then on, and for the next 28 years, Konrad and Sophie will attempt to meet again, in spite of the Iron Curtain. Konrad, who has become a reputed Astrophysicist, tries to take advantage of scientific congresses outside Eastern Germany to arrange encounters with Sophie. But in a country where the political police, the Stasi, monitors the moves of all suspicious people (such as Konrad's sister Barbara and her husband Harald), preserving one's privacy, ideals and self-respect becomes an exhausting fight, even as the Eastern block begins its long process of disintegration.

By pure coincidence, a photograph found on the internet by chance of a renowned American opera singer, Caterina Fabiani, throws the lives of Paul Kromberger and his daughter Sophie into complete chaos. Paul, well advanced in his years, appears to recognize the image as that of his deceased wife Evelyn, Sophie's mother. Unable to convince her controlling-and-stubborn-to-a-fault father otherwise, Sophie sets off for New York to seek out this mysterious stranger...

Three people rob a bank to help a day care center that's in debt. Wolf is captured, Werner identified, police suspect Christa is the third. She and Werner ask Hans, a clergyman, to launder the money and give it to the kindergarten. He refuses. They try Ingrid, Christa's friend, who tries to help, but the school rejects the money. When tragedy strikes Werner, Hans helps Christa bolt to a collective in Portugal. Ingrid visits her; their relationship makes the collective nervous, so she returns to Germany and ceases living in hiding. The police are still looking for her and so is a witness to the robbery, Lena, a bank clerk. Lena's interest brings Christa's second awakening.

When Ruth's husband dies in New York, in 2000, she imposes strict Jewish mourning, which puzzles her children. A stranger comes to the house - Ruth's cousin - with a picture of Ruth, age 8, in Berlin, with a woman the cousin says helped Ruth escape. Hannah, Ruth's daughter engaged to a gentile, goes to Berlin to find the woman, Lena Fisher, now 90. Posing as a journalist investigating intermarriage, Hannah interviews Lena who tells the story of a week in 1943 when the Jewish husbands of Aryan women were detained in a building on Rosenstrasse. The women gather daily for word of their husbands. The film goes back and forth to tell Ruth and Lena's story. How will it affect Hannah?

Olga and Ruth become friends. Olga is independent, separated from her husband, living with an immigrant pianist, and teaching feminist literature. Ruth is withdrawn, a painter, possibly mentally ill. Ruth dreams in black and white, sometimes of her suicide. Olga lectures on a 19th-century writer, von Günderrode, a suicide after the breakup of her intense friendship with Bettina Brentano. Ruth's husband Franz encourages the women's friendship, then, as Olga draws Ruth out and the friendship deepens, he becomes jealous. After the women travel to Egypt, Franz has a tirade. Ruth seems crushed between her husband and her friend, and how she responds is the film's climax.

1986 film by Margarethe von Trotta

Hildegard von Bingen was truly a woman ahead of her time. A visionary in every sense of the word, this famed 12th-century Benedictine nun was a Christian mystic, composer, philosopher, playwright, poet, naturalist, scientist, physician, herbalist and ecological activist.

2018 film by Margarethe von Trotta, Felix Moeller

1981 film by Margarethe von Trotta

After a chance encounter with a wanted man, a woman is harassed by the police and press until she takes violent action.

2012 film by Margarethe von Trotta