Katja Riemann, Maria Schrader, Svea Lohde
An anonymous street in the heart of Berlin seems an unlikely location for one of the most amazing acts of resistance of World War II, but it was here that a small group of women took on Hitler’s SS and won.
In 1943 Lena (Katja Riemann, winner of Best Actress award at Venice Film Festival 2003) was a beautiful, talented pianist disowned by her aristocratic father because she married a Jew.
When her husband is rounded up by the Nazis Lena tracks him down to an old building in Rosenstrasse where he and hundreds of others await deportation to the camps. Sixty years later, a New York journalist, Hannah Weinstein arrives in Berlin to talk to Lena Fischer, the woman who saved her mother’s life. Margarethe von Trotta (The German Sisters, Rosa Luxembourg) intertwines the stories of Hannah and Lena, Berlin 1943 and New York 2001, Rosenstrasse becomes a film about today, a plea for tolerance and solidarity and a compassionate love story.