Q & A with HANNAH ARENDT filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta, star Barbara Sukowa, and screenwriter Pamela Katz, recorded May 29, 2013 at a screening of the film at Film Forum

Summary: HANNAH ARENDT: “Premier David Ben-Gurion announced today that Adolf Eichmann, the S.S. colonel who headed the Gestapo’s Jewish Section, was under arrest in Israel and would stand trial for his life.” – The New York Times (May 24, 1960). The luminous Barbara Sukowa stars as the brilliant German-Jewish emigree, Hannah Arendt – sent to cover the trial in Jerusalem by New Yorker editor William Shawn; her coverage becomes one of the most important and controversial books ever written on the Holocaust: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. A veritable hornet’s nest of ugly accusations, recriminations, and counter-charges greets Arendt’s proposition that ordinary people are capable of the vile acts for which Eichmann stands justly accused. Arendt’s loyal friend, writer Mary McCarthy (played by Janet McTeer) comes to her defense in Margarethe von Trotta’s deeply serious, yet wildly entertaining look at the lives and loves of a bevy of New York’s most famed intellectuals during the 1950s and ‘60s. Von Trotta -- working with longtime co-screenwriter Pamela Katz -- brings a practiced eye, a compassionate mind, and, appropriately, fearless independence, to this riveting portrait of a woman of both ideas and heart. This podcast is a recording of the Q & A with HANNAH ARENDT filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta, star Barbara Sukowa, and screenwriter Pamela Katz, recorded May 29, 2013 at a screening of the film at Film Forum