Ulrike Marie Meinhof: Letter to Her Daughter (1994)

Overview

Filmmaker Timon Koulmasis, a 33-year-old filmmaker, wanted to understand why his childhood friend's mother became a terrorist and how she, herself an orphan who never recovered from her loss, abandoned her daughters. Ulrike Marie Meinhof is an intimate portrait of a woman whose name became taboo in her family for twenty-five years. The film consists of amateur footage, texts written by the journalist, her public and television appearances, and, above all, testimonies from her loved ones, punctuated with archival documents, to better reveal the profound disconnect between the woman and the superficial image of her portrayed by her era. She is neither the bloodthirsty caricature denounced by the media nor the “martyr” described by some activists.