Margarethe von Trotta

Margarethe von Trotta

Born: February 21, 1942
in Berlin, Germany
Margarethe von Trotta (German: [maʁɡaˈʁeːtə fɔn ˈtʁɔta]; born 21 February 1942; Berlin) 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.

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.

Movies for Margarethe von Trotta...

Come With Me to the Cinema – The Gregors
Title: Come With Me to the Cinema – The Gregors
Character: Margarethe von Trotta
Released: September 1, 2022
Type: Movie
From the 1950s onwards, Erika and Ulrich Gregor brought countless film historical milestones to Berlin and shaped cinema discourse in post-war Germany. A look at the life and work of the couple without whom Arsenal and the Forum wouldn’t exist.
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Margarethe von Trotta: A Women's Director
Title: Margarethe von Trotta: A Women's Director
Character: Self - Filmmaker
Released: February 19, 2022
Type: Movie
Margarethe von Trotta, one of the few icons of German directing, internationally revered as a star director, celebrates her 80th birthday: her works are among the most important in German cinema of all time.
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Alida Valli: In Her Own Words
Title: Alida Valli: In Her Own Words
Character: Self
Released: May 17, 2021
Type: Movie
A complete and never-before-seen portrait of the life of a young girl from Pula (Istria) who quickly became one of the most famous and beloved actresses of Italian and international cinema, told through the words of her unpublished letters and diaries, photographs, homemade films in 8 mm, and new interviews with her relatives, friends, and collaborators.
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It Could Have Been Worse - Mario Adorf
Title: It Could Have Been Worse - Mario Adorf
Character: Herself
Released: February 10, 2019
Type: Movie
Portrays the film star Mario Adorf and his passion for acting, the stage, the cinema, singing and writing. Together with the director Dominik Wessely, the film comes closer to Mario Adorf as a person and highlights important stations of his private life and his international career. When Mario Adorf begins to talk about his life, over 60 years of theatre and film history come to life. A dialogue with him is not only a retrospective, but also an intensive exchange of ideas about film and theatre and his view of the world, love and ageing.
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Rosa Luxemburg: Der Preis der Freiheit
Title: Rosa Luxemburg: Der Preis der Freiheit
Character: herself
Released: January 15, 2019
Type: Movie
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Searching for Ingmar Bergman
Title: Searching for Ingmar Bergman
Character: Herself - Filmmaker
Released: July 12, 2018
Type: Movie
A meaningful account of the personal and professional life of the great Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007) that explores his film legacy, with interviews with his closest collaborators and a new generation of filmmakers.
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Sympathisanten - Unser deutscher Herbst
Title: Sympathisanten - Unser deutscher Herbst
Character: Self
Released: May 24, 2018
Type: Movie
West Germany in the 1970s. Many artists, journalists and intellectuals were branded as sympathizers of Baader-Meinhof's left-wing terrorism. The parents of the director, too: Margarethe von Trotta and his stepfather, Volker Schlöndorff. With extensive archive materials and film clips as well as Margarethe von Trotta's private diaries the film portrays one German family and the society of the time.
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Les réalisatrices contemporaines:  l'état des choses
Title: Les réalisatrices contemporaines: l'état des choses
Character: Self
Released: July 18, 2016
Type: Movie
Right at the heart of the debates on the discrimination of women in the film industry, this documentary raises questions, while offering a voice to women and their cinema. Catherine Breillat, Claire Denis, Mira Nair, Margarethe Von Trotta, Ulrike Ottinger, Micheline Lanctot, Rakshnan Bani-Etemad, María Novaro but also the names of the less visible directors of the general public. Joining the filmmakers are the voices and comments of producers, film specialists and archivists through whom our images are meticulously preserved.
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Gian Luigi Rondi - Vita, cinema, passione
Title: Gian Luigi Rondi - Vita, cinema, passione
Character: Self
Released: September 2, 2014
Type: Movie
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Reel Herstory: The Real Story of Reel Women
Title: Reel Herstory: The Real Story of Reel Women
Character: Self
Released: August 10, 2014
Type: Movie
Using rare footage and exclusive interviews with filmmakers from all over the globe, "Reel Herstory" corrects the historic notion that women behind the scenes in motion pictures held peripheral careers compared with their male counterparts.
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Forbidden Films
Title: Forbidden Films
Character: Herself
Released: March 6, 2014
Type: Movie
Between 1933 and 1945 roughly 1200 films were made in Germany, of which 300 were banned by the Allied forces. Today, around 40 films, called "Vorbehaltsfilme", are locked away from the public with an uncertain future. Should they be re-released, destroyed, or continue to be neglected? Verbotene Filme takes a closer look at some of these forbidden films.
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Title: Square
Character: Self
Released: January 8, 2012
Type: TV
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Nuits transparentes
Title: Nuits transparentes
Released: April 14, 2011
Type: Movie
Strolling through France (Roanne, Nice and Carcassonne) with some excursions abroad (Munich, Montreal, New York).
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Screenwriters on Screenwriting
Title: Screenwriters on Screenwriting
Released: January 1, 2008
Type: Movie
This documentary premiered at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Explore the challenging world of the screenwriter with renowned industry writers.
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Foreign Directors on Directing
Title: Foreign Directors on Directing
Released: January 1, 2008
Type: Movie
Non-US directors speak about the idiosyncrasies of filmmaking in their respective countries. Because of the difficulty of financing, very few American film directors establish a body of work. For American women directors, the problem is two-fold. But in Europe, Canada, and some countries of South America, filmmaking is often government subsidized, making it possible for filmmakers to become prolific in their craft.
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Von Sex bis Simmel
Title: Von Sex bis Simmel
Character: Self
Released: February 4, 2005
Type: Movie
A documentary by Hans Günther Pflaum and Peter H. Schröder.
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Title: Lesen! Mit Elke Heidenreich
Character: Self
Released: April 29, 2003
Type: TV
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Title: Gero von Boehm begegnet...
Character: Self
Released: April 9, 2002
Type: TV
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The Night of the Filmmakers
Title: The Night of the Filmmakers
Character: Self
Released: February 12, 1995
Type: Movie
A meditation on the first 100 years of German cinema, featuring an assembly of German filmmakers.
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The Heart and the Legs
Title: The Heart and the Legs
Character: Self
Released: March 1, 1989
Type: Movie
The heart of the legs.
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Calling the Shots
Title: Calling the Shots
Character: Self
Released: September 8, 1988
Type: Movie
Documentary about women in the film industry. Numerous notable actresses and female directors share their thoughts.
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Hands Up!
Title: Hands Up!
Character: Self (1981 footage) (uncredited)
Released: January 21, 1985
Type: Movie
The reunion of a group of former medical students results in a flood of bitter memories.
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Blaubart
Title: Blaubart
Character: Jutta
Released: October 27, 1984
Type: Movie
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Sheer Madness
Title: Sheer Madness
Released: February 25, 1983
Type: Movie
Olga and Ruth become friends. Olga is independent, separated from her husband, living with an immigrant pianist, and teaching feminist literature. Ruth is withdrawn, a painter, possibly mentally ill. Ruth dreams in black and white, sometimes of her suicide. Olga lectures on a 19th-century writer, von Günderrode, a suicide after the breakup of her intense friendship with Bettina Brentano. Ruth's husband Franz encourages the women's friendship, then, as Olga draws Ruth out and the friendship deepens, he becomes jealous. After the women travel to Egypt, Franz has a tirade. Ruth seems crushed between her husband and her friend, and how she responds is the film's climax.
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Title: Bayerischer Filmpreis
Character: Self
Released: December 1, 1979
Type: TV
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Title: NDR Talk Show
Character: Self
Released: February 9, 1979
Type: TV
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Cinématon
Title: Cinématon
Character: N°576
Released: December 20, 1978
Type: Movie
Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.
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Germany in Autumn
Title: Germany in Autumn
Character: Self (uncredited)
Released: March 3, 1978
Type: Movie
Germany in Autumn does not have a plot per se; it mixes documentary footage, along with standard movie scenes, to give the audience the mood of Germany during the late 1970s. The movie covers the two month time period during 1977 when a businessman was kidnapped, and later murdered, by the left-wing terrorists known as the RAF-Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction). The businessman had been kidnapped in an effort to secure the release of the orginal leaders of the RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang. When the kidnapping effort and a plane hijacking effort failed, the three most prominent leaders of the RAF, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe, all committed suicide in prison. It has become an article of faith within the left-wing community that these three were actually murdered by the state.
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Beer Chase
Title: Beer Chase
Character: Frau mit Kind
Released: January 1, 1977
Type: Movie
A man who is dissatisfied with his senseless existence in his family-life and social status steals the uniform of a policeman and then enters the Oktoberfest. Now he is somebody, he is important, he can help, people respect him, etc. His wife, other relatives and some friends start to follow him while he gets some new acquaintances. (IMDB review)
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Coup de Grâce
Title: Coup de Grâce
Character: Sophie de Reval
Released: October 21, 1976
Type: Movie
A countess loves her brother's Prussian-officer friend in the 1919 Baltic area.
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Title: Nouvelles d'Henry James
Character: Kate Theory
Released: March 13, 1976
Type: TV
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The Atlantic Swimmers
Title: The Atlantic Swimmers
Character: Schwimmlehrerin
Released: February 27, 1976
Type: Movie
Munich Heinz and Herbert wants to escape the torturous confines of their home by swimming across the Atlantic.
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Title: Kölner Treff
Character: Self
Released: January 25, 1976
Type: TV
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Georginas Gründe
Title: Georginas Gründe
Character: Kate Theory
Released: April 27, 1975
Type: Movie
Adaptation of a story by Henry James.
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Das Andechser Gefühl
Title: Das Andechser Gefühl
Released: April 18, 1975
Type: Movie
An anxious teacher (played, as is the lead role in all his films, by the director) sits in a beer garden on the hill of the Andechs monastery. While flies drown in his mug of beer, he confronts a life of failure: the wife he ignored, the child he neglected, the teaching duties he has shirked, and his doomed efforts at winning tenure from school officials. Only a dream from the past-the memory of a former liaison with a film star with whom he shared "the Andechs feeling, a feeling that we are not alone" - provides sustenance. Despite an unexpected series of events, longing in Achternbusch's world ultimately remains stronger than fulfilment and thirst better than beer.
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The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum
Title: The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum
Released: January 10, 1975
Type: Movie
After a chance encounter with a wanted man, a woman is harassed by the police and press until she takes violent action.
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Title: III nach neun
Character: Self
Released: November 19, 1974
Type: TV
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Une invitation à la chasse
Title: Une invitation à la chasse
Character: Paulette
Released: November 1, 1974
Type: Movie
Claude Chabrol film for TV based on the short story An Invitation to the Hunt by Georges Hitchcock. Receiving an unexpected invitation to participate in the annual hunt party given by the local marquis, a common man deludes himself into thinking he’s a valued member of society, gets in debt to live up to his own fantasies, puts on airs, and invents a perfectly untrue—but, to his mind, fitting—past for a man of his new station. Then the cruel game starts.
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Title: Histoires insolites
Released: October 19, 1974
Type: TV
The spirit of this series is very unusual but not fantastic. In these stories, the unusual is capricious everyday life, offbeat realism, that is to say that the facts are ordinary until the moment when the situation slips into the unusual.
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Stayover in Tirol
Title: Stayover in Tirol
Character: Katja
Released: October 8, 1974
Type: Movie
An adaptation of the Henry James short story Les raisons de Georgina.
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Title: Motiv Liebe
Released: March 19, 1974
Type: TV
Motiv Liebe is a German television series.
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Title: Unter einem Dach
Released: January 1, 1974
Type: TV
Unter einem Dach is a German television series.
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Desaster
Title: Desaster
Character: Ulla Werther
Released: March 19, 1973
Type: Movie
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Title: Ein Fall für Männdli
Character: Gerlinde Furtner
Released: January 1, 1973
Type: TV
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A Free Woman
Title: A Free Woman
Character: Elisabeth Junker
Released: November 1, 1972
Type: Movie
A divorced woman in her thirties fights a losing battle in Munich to attain belated self-fulfillment. The die is cast in a briskly impersonal society geared to male dominance and early training for career women.
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The Morals of Ruth Halbfass
Title: The Morals of Ruth Halbfass
Character: Doris Vogelsang
Released: April 12, 1972
Type: Movie
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Beware of a Holy Whore
Title: Beware of a Holy Whore
Character: Babs
Released: August 28, 1971
Type: Movie
Tensions between members of a film crew build while they wait for the arrival of the director and star to arrive on location.
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The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach
Title: The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach
Character: Sophie
Released: April 14, 1971
Type: Movie
An intriguing Hans Christian Anderson-style fairy tale aesthetic and voice over narration. Sudden Wealth is a despairing chronicle of a group of starving peasants who finally seize governmental wealth like a dysfunctional group of Robin Hood's Merry Men, only to be betrayed by their inescapable selves and systematically dehumanized (think bucolic Orwell) and reprogrammed by what we'll put under the rubric of God and Country.
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Paul Esbeck
Title: Paul Esbeck
Character: Ute
Released: April 7, 1971
Type: Movie
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The American Soldier
Title: The American Soldier
Character: Maid
Released: October 9, 1970
Type: Movie
Ricky returns to Munich from Vietnam and is promptly hired as a contract killer.
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Title: Der Fall von nebenan
Released: September 23, 1970
Type: TV
Der Fall von nebenan is a German television series.
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Title: Hauptbahnhof München
Character: Karin Lohmann
Released: September 13, 1970
Type: TV
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Gods of the Plague
Title: Gods of the Plague
Character: Margarethe
Released: July 24, 1970
Type: Movie
A man is released from prison and finds the society on the outside less than appealing. With several women as well as the police on his tail, he sets out to find an old friend.
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Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?
Title: Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?
Released: June 28, 1970
Type: Movie
The life of a married Munich technical draftsman with a son.
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Drücker
Title: Drücker
Character: Gitte
Released: April 15, 1970
Type: Movie
Drama about the life of a travelling salesman.
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Baal
Title: Baal
Character: Sophie
Released: January 7, 1970
Type: Movie
Baal explores the cult of the genius, an anti-heroic figure who chooses to be a social outcast and live on the fringe of bourgeois morality.
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Brandstifter
Title: Brandstifter
Character: Anka
Released: May 12, 1969
Type: Movie
A drama set in Cologne’s revolutionary circles of the late 1960s.
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Spielst Du mit schrägen Vögeln
Title: Spielst Du mit schrägen Vögeln
Character: Helga
Released: April 16, 1969
Type: Movie
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Title: Ein Sommer mit Nicole
Released: March 7, 1969
Type: TV
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Title: Der Kommissar
Character: Ute Hinz
Released: January 3, 1969
Type: TV
Der Kommissar is a German television series about a group of detectives of the Munich homicide squad. All 97 episodes, which were shot in black-and-white and first broadcast between 1969 and 1976, were written by Herbert Reinecker and starred Erik Ode as Kommissar Herbert Keller. Keller's assistants were Walter Grabert, Robert Heines, and Harry Klein who, in 1974, was replaced by his younger brother Erwin Klein.
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Title: Der Kommissar
Character: Amanda Gruber
Released: January 3, 1969
Type: TV
Der Kommissar is a German television series about a group of detectives of the Munich homicide squad. All 97 episodes, which were shot in black-and-white and first broadcast between 1969 and 1976, were written by Herbert Reinecker and starred Erik Ode as Kommissar Herbert Keller. Keller's assistants were Walter Grabert, Robert Heines, and Harry Klein who, in 1974, was replaced by his younger brother Erwin Klein.
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Title: Der Kommissar
Character: Irma Klenze
Released: January 3, 1969
Type: TV
Der Kommissar is a German television series about a group of detectives of the Munich homicide squad. All 97 episodes, which were shot in black-and-white and first broadcast between 1969 and 1976, were written by Herbert Reinecker and starred Erik Ode as Kommissar Herbert Keller. Keller's assistants were Walter Grabert, Robert Heines, and Harry Klein who, in 1974, was replaced by his younger brother Erwin Klein.
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Tränen trocknet der Wind
Title: Tränen trocknet der Wind
Released: October 13, 1967
Type: Movie
Melodrama set in Hamburg's red light district.
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Das Vergnügen, anständig zu sein
Title: Das Vergnügen, anständig zu sein
Character: Zimmermädchen
Released: October 17, 1966
Type: Movie
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Title: Goldene Kamera Verleihung
Character: Self
Released: January 25, 1966
Type: TV
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Title: Deutscher Filmpreis
Character: Self
Released: January 1, 1951
Type: TV