Ingeborg Bachmann - Journey into the Desert

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1h 50m | Drama

Paris. Summer, 1958. When the charismatic, 32-year-old Ingeborg (Krieps) first meets Swiss playwright Max Frisch (Ronald Zehrfield, Barbara, Phoenix), a man fifteen years her senior, they are already international celebrities of the literary world.

Their courtship is rapid, and in the four years that follow they share a passionate but open relationship between his hometown of Zurich and her adopted Rome.

Friction is never far from the surface - Max envies her fame; Ingeborg finds his typewriter clatter and his jealousy annoying - yet Ingeborg remains productive; in Berlin, she writes the famous speech: "The Truth is Bearable for Humankind". She realises only later - with journalist Adolf Opel (Tobias Resch) in the Egyptian Sahara, and composer Hans Werner Henze (Basil Eidenbenz) in Italy - how much she has been suffering...An icon of the New German cinema, Von Trotta (Hannah Arendt, Rosenstrasse) continues her career-long focus on strong female protagonists with this engaging story of an artist conditioned by times that had not yet caught up with her.

With its sweeping locations and skilful interweaving between the personal and the professional, the film is a thought-provoking study of a free-thinking woman attempting to claim love, respect and her rightful space.