Rosenstrasse

Women fight for their families in Rosenstrasse.

Herald rating: * * *

On limited release, this drama set in Nazi Germany marks a return to the big screen for director von Trotta, whose best work was in the 70s and who has been working in television for many years.

It's a potent piece of work about a little-known 1944 protest by a group of Gentile women married to Jews. They claimed their husbands, who were being held in a building on the Berlin street of the title pending transport to death camps, were protected under Nazi law and their perseverance eventually shamed the authorities into conceding.

Unwisely, the film tries to cram in a sequel storyline, set 60 years later in New York, about a woman, a child at the time, whose adult daughter sets out to find out facts about the family that have been kept from her. The two plots fit uneasily together - one is about a slightly neurotic New Yorker and the other about a group of heroic women fighting for their lives - and as a result the film is both too long and too slow. But at its best it is a powerful evocation of a stirring true story.

CAST: Katja Riemann, Maria Schrader, Martin Feifel, Jurgen Vogel, Jutte Lampe, Doris Schade
DIRECTOR: Margarethe von Trotta
RUNNING TIME: 135 minutes
RATING: M
SCREENING: Lido