Hannah Arendt

Actress Barbara Sukowa and director Margarethe von Trotta gained plaudits for their 1986 collaboration Rosa Luxemburg, and here they shed light on the life of another formidable 20th-century woman, the German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt. Not so much a biopic - though Arendt's flight from persecution in 1937 and her affair with mentor-turned-Nazi sympathiser Martin Heidegger are touched upon - von Trotta's lucid, thoughtful drama focuses on the renowned scholar's attendance at the trial of Nazi chief Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 and the fallout from her New Yorker articles and resulting book in which she coined the touchstone phrase, "the banality of evil", with regard to the Final Solution. The idea that one of the architects of the Holocaust could be "a nobody", a bureaucrat who "only obeyed orders", as well as Arendt's assertion that some Jewish leaders were complicit in what happened, unleashed a torrent of hostility from Zionist friends and other intellectuals in her adopted American home, which threatened to destroy her career. Sukowa is quietly impressive as the chain-smoking thinker, Janet McTeer stands out as Arendt's fiercely loyal friend Mary McCarthy, the period is subtly rendered and the climactic defence of her ideas before a class of students and critics is a stirring and thought-provoking coda.