Olga and Ruth become friends. Olga is independent, separated from her husband, living with an immigrant pianist, and teaching feminist literature. Ruth is withdrawn, a painter, possibly mentally ill. Ruth dreams in black and white, sometimes of her suicide. Olga lectures on a 19th-century writer, von Günderrode, a suicide after the breakup of her intense friendship with Bettina Brentano. Ruth’s husband Franz encourages the women’s friendship, then, as Olga draws Ruth out and the friendship deepens, he becomes jealous. After the women travel to Egypt, Franz has a tirade. Ruth seems crushed between her husband and her friend, and how she responds is the film’s climax. –IMDb
Margarethe von Trotta (born 21 February 1942, Berlin) is a German film director and a member of the New German Cinema movement.
The child of Elisabeth von Trotta and painter Alfred Roloff, she relocated to Paris in the 1960s, where she worked for film collectives, collaborating on scripts and co-directing short films.
In her early career, von Trotta was an actress, appearing in notable films of directors Fassbinder and Volker Schlöndorff. In 1971, she divorced her first husband to marry Schlöndorff. A few years later she presented her first feature film.
Von Trotta, often featuring prominent female characters, has become the foremost female director working in Germany. She is a Professor of Film at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee and remains an important personality of German cinema. Von Trotta and Schlöndorff split in 1991. —wikipedia