A recording of the Q & A with VISION star BARBARA SUKOWA, recorded October 28, 2010, at Film Forum

Summary: VISION: The 12th-century Benedictine nun, Hildegard von Bingen — today a cult figure — is luminously portrayed by Barbara Sukowa in her 5th collaboration with director Margarethe von Trotta. Hildegard, a polymath by any century’s definition, was a composer of Gregorian chants, a playwright, poet, and scientific pioneer in the fields of healing, herbal medicine and botany. As an iconoclastic religious figure who insisted on separate and independent abbies for nuns, she ran up against the church’s authoritarian and patriarchal hierarchy; as a mystic and visionary, she insisted on her right to preach and interpret the Gospels. Sukowa infuses Hildegard with the will of a modern feminist, but one tethered to a medieval universe. Von Trotta makes that world believable and lush, and at times as scary and alluring as a 900-year-old fairy tale. This podcast episode is a recording of the Q & A with VISION star BARBARA SUKOWA, recorded October 28, 2010, at Film Forum during a screening of the film.