Hannah Arendt was one of the most prominent thinkers of the 20th century. The film tells the story of her relations with Martin Heidegger, her university career, and her life in the community of German emigrants in the USA. The director, however, concentrated mainly on Arendt’s journalistic reportage from the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who was hiding in Argentina after the war. In 1960 he was captured by Israeli intelligence officers and brought to trial in Jerusalem. Arendt’s reportage, written for the prestigious “New Yorker,” was later published as a book titled “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.” It provoked a lot of negative emotions, especially among the Jewish portion of the public eye. In von Trotta’s film the author of “The Origins of Totalitarianism” will be forced to sacrifice a lot in order to retain the independence of her beliefs.

An article about the director HERE.