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The European Film Academy has awarded the actress, director and screenwriter Margarethe Von Trotta with its Lifetime Achievement Award. The European Film Awards, now in its 35th year, recognises von Trotta’s unique contribution to film which includes Golden Lion winner Marianne & Juliane (1981).
The filmmaker, who grew up with her mother in the German city of Düsseldorf, has recently released Bachmann & Frisch which deals with the relationship between writers Ingeborg Bachmann and Max Frisch. She started her career as an actress, in theatre and appearing in films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schlöndorff before taking the director’s chair for 1978 film, The Second Awakening of Christa Klages.
Following her critically-acclaimed Marianne & Juliane about the “German Sisters” Christiane and Gudrun Ensslin she made Sheer Madness which ran in competition in Berlin in 1983. Next came Rosa Luxemburg in 1986 starring Barbara Sukowa about the German-Polish socialist. It premiered at Cannes and Sukowa won Best Actress. The film also received an honorary award at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.
Von Trotta, who will be an honorary guest at the 35th European Film Awards Ceremony on December 10 in Reykjavik, became a leading female director of European auteur cinema in the 1980s and has continued to uphold that reputation with an active fight against pornography and misogyny.
In 2018 she returned to Cannes with Searching for Ingmar Bergman. Before that she won two German Film Awards and got main actress Barbara Sukowa a nomination for the European Film Awards with 2012’s Hannah Arendt. The film, a portrait of the German-Jewish academic, followed the well-received Rosenstrasse about the 1943 Rosenstrasse protest of non-Jewish wives and relatives of Jewish men which won the Volpi Cup for Katja Riemann in Venice, followed by the Italian Golden Globe and another David di Donatello as well as a nomination for the European Film Awards.
Von Trotta’s Lifetime Achievement Award at the 35th European Film Awards is another in an increasing number of career-based accolades following the filmmaker’s 2013 Honoury Dragon Award at the Göteborg Film Festival. She’s also in receipt of the 2018 Espiga de Honor at the Valladolid International Film Festival, a German Honorary Film Award in 2019, and the 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.
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