31/08/2003 - Margarethe Von Trotta returns to the Lido with a little known story of extraordinary courage and dignity in the face of hatred and war

VENICE 2003 SPECIAL

Surely the whole world knows everything about the human tragedy that was the Nazi movement? Has every stone been turned and revealed the ugly things hiding in shameful obscurity?
Incredible as it may seem, we have still a few things to learn about that shameful page in world history, for example, the 1943 revolt staged by Aryan women married to Jews imprisoned in the Rosenstrasse jail in Berlin. The courageous women decided to hold a peaceful protest outside the prison to save their spouses from almost certain death in the camps. Amazingly, they succeeded in getting their men-folk released.

That is the premise of Margarethe Von Trotta’s latest film, Rosenstrasse [+see also:
trailer
film profile]. As we have come to expect, the German director drew inspiration from a women’s story for this film.

Produced by Studio Hamburg Letterbox, Telemuenchen and Holland’s Get Reel Productions, and distributed by Concorde with support from FFF-Bavaria, the Hamburg Film and Berlin-Brandenburg Film Funds, BKM, the Dutch Film and Cobo Funds, Rosenstrasse was a long time in the making.
The reason for this is financial. Margarethe Von Trotta first inkling about this film dates back to 1994. “I wrote several versions of this film, cutting down the number of characters: had I maintained the original project, it would have been just too costly an enterprise,” said von Trotta, “but that wasn’t a problem because I dealt with each individual character and their fate. Until, that is, History hit their lives with a bang.”
The cast is almost entirely female and includes Jutta Lampe (one of the stars of Anni di Piombo), Katja Riemann (Bibi Blocksberg) and Maria Schrader (Nobody Loves Me, Aimée und Jaguar), as well as Juergen Vogel (who presented Mein Name ist Bach in Locarno), Martin Feifel and Fedja van Huet.

(Translated from Italian)