A science-fiction film set in a dystopian world, where a Christian fundamentalist right-wing government is in power during a time when pollution and other problems have caused mass human sterility. In the society women have lost all human rights and those women who can still conceive are often forced to become “handmaids”. Kate is caught trying to cross the border and her husband is shot and her little girl lost. As a woman capable of bearing children she is taken to a centre where she is subjected to a barage of indoctrination and made into a “handmaid”. She is allocated to a powerful member of the government to produce a child with him. His wife is jealous and resents her, although desperately wants her to produce a child for them. Kate is attracted to a Security Guard, and she becomes pregnant by him. She also learns of a Resistance movement through another handmaid. She assassinates the government official, and with the help of the Security guard, escapes into the mountains. –BFI
Volker Schlöndorff (born 31 March 1939 in Wiesbaden, Germany) is a Berlin-based German filmmaker.
He won an Oscar as well as the Palme d’or at the Cannes Film Festival for The Tin Drum (1979), the film version of the novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Günter Grass.
Schlöndorff has adapted many literary works for his movies, including some critically well-received US productions, but he is also engaged in post-war German politics. He served as the chief executive for the UFA studio in Babelsberg. Volker Schlöndorff also teaches film and literature at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where he conducts an Intensive Summer Seminar.
He was married to fellow film director Margarethe von Trotta from 1971 to 1991. —Wikipedia
