Margarethe von Trotta (; born 21 February 1942) is a German film director, screenwriter, and actress. She has been referred to as a "leading force" of the New German Cinema movement. Von Trotta's extensive body of work has won awards internationally. She was married to and collaborated with director Volker Schlöndorff. Although they made a successful team, von Trotta felt she was seen as secondary to Schlöndorff. Subsequently, she established a solo career for herself and became "Germany's foremost female film director, who has offered the most sustained and successful female variant of Autorenkino in postwar German film history". Certain aspects of von Trotta's work have been compared to Ingmar Bergman's features from the 1960s and 1970s. Von Trotta has been called "the world's leading feminist filmmaker". The predominant aim of her films is to create new representations of women. Her films are concerned with relationships between and among women (sisters, best friends, etc.), as well as with relationships between women and men, and include political settings. Nevertheless, she rejects the suggestion that she makes "women's films". She is a recipient of one Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival, 2 David di Donatello Awards, Gold Hugo Award at Chicago International Film Festival, Lifetime Achievement Award at European Film Award, Lifetime Achievement Award at German Film Awards, 2 Palme d'Or nominations at Cannes Film Festival, and numerous other awards and nominations. Early life The child of Elisabeth von Trotta and painter Alfred Roloff, she was born in Berlin. She and her mother moved to Düsseldorf after the end of World War II. Von Trotta shared a strong bond with her mother in the absence of her father. She has spoken about how her relationship with her mother gave her a sensitivity for friendships and solidarity between women, a theme that is seen in most of her films. Von Trotta relocated to Paris in the 1960s, where she worked for film collectives, collaborating on scripts and co-directing short films. In her early career, von Trotta was an actress, appearing in the early films of directors Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schlöndorff. In one of many interviews, von Trotta said: "I came from Germany before the New Wave, so we had all these silly movies. Cinema for me was entertainment, but it was not art. When I came to Paris, I saw several films of Ingmar Bergman, and all of the sudden I