Film Screening
Ingeborg Bachmann – Journey into the Desert

New Films from Germany

Sun, 09/17/2023
11:00 AM Coolidge Corner Theatre, Brookline, MA 02446

She is Austrian, he Swiss; she is a poet, he a playwright; she is a daredevil yet vulnerable, he is adventurous but a little conservative. 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. Their love is passionate, but professional and personal friction begins to disrupt the harmony.
She only realises afterwards that she is suffering, and by how much – with Adolf Opel in the desert, and with Hans Werner Henze in Italy. Margarethe von Trotta interweaves the times before and after the catastrophe. Her direction is frank, sober and elegant. Ronald Zehrfeld as the corpulent, pipe-smoking Frisch and Vicky Krieps are the perfect match. This film is not about Bachmann’s fatal end, but about her hopes for love and respect, in literature, and in life.

Director: Margarethe von Trotta
DCP, 111 min.
Germany 2023

Margarethe von Trotta is a German director and scriptwriter who has been referred to as a "leading force" of the New German Cinema movement. She started her career as an actress for directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder und Volker Schlöndorff in the late 1960s but quickly gained interest in writing and directing feature films. She quickly became one of Germany’s leading female directors and an integral part of the German “Autorenkino”. Her films, which often centered around strong female protagonists and women in context of history, premiered at the most important international film festivals, such as Venice Film Festival, Festival de Cannes and Berlinale and were honored around the world (e.g. Golden Lion, German Film Award). In 2022 she received the European Cinema Lifetime Achievement Award.