Hannah Arendt

Considered as a cinematographic work of art, Margarethe von Trotta’s film Hannah Arendt is nothing special. It’s a pretty straightforward piece of story-telling, quite well made and very well acted by Barbara Sukowa. Interesting though Hannah Arendt was as a philosopher and as a person, it was still quite an achievement to make such a watchable film from this material: a German Jewish philosopher writes a book about the trial of a Nazi war criminal, thereby making herself very unpopular with the Jews (including lots of her friends) in New York and Israel – the end. The fact that the films succeeds as well as it does says a lot about the exceptional talents of both its director and its leading actress.