A “stubborn old lady” is how Marceline was described recently – with respect. At the beginning of the film by Cordelia Dvorák, an almost 90-year-old woman is shown signing copies of her book for fans and answering questions after reading from her book “You haven’t returned.” She wears extravagant rings on both hands, which depict insects and other animals. Even at her age, she is still radically and passionately non-conformist. “One must not have fear in life. If you’re afraid, you’re lost,” is her lesson to a young reader. At home in her Paris apartment, she discusses her next autobiographical book project with her co-author. Marceline Rozenberg is 15 years old as she and her father – a Jew from the Lodz region – are arrested in southern France and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She survives as number 78750, unlike her father. She returns to France in 1945, her mother and siblings were able to avoid deportation in a hideout. As Marceline returns, she is met with a wall of silence. From then on, she lives in Paris, wandering through cafes, searching for a foothold with affairs and, above all, with art and literature. In 1960 she appears in Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s path-breaking documentary film “Chronicle of a Summer”, which established Cinéma Verité. The political film becomes her new homeland. Like many artists and intellectuals at the end of the 60s, she becomes a left-wing activist. She meets the legendary Dutch documentary film producer Joris Ivens, travels with him during the war to North Vietnam, and works on his pro-Vietcong film “The 17th Parallel”. She films in the civil war in Algeria and takes sides – later in her old age she will judge this to have been naive. With Ivens, who was 30 years her senior, a great love and working relationship develops. In the 70s she realizes 13 films about the Cultural Revolution in China. Shortly before his death, they also film together in China for Ivens’ last film, “A Tale of the Wind.” The film portrait is composed of conversations with Marceline and several of her companions, and film excerpts from the afore mentioned films, which she comments on with great clarity. It becomes clear that Marceline draws her energy for work and her attitude – “I am a woman without dumb principles” – from her traumatic experience of the holocaust. “My university Birkenau” is how she terms the source of her courage. Dvoráks film is a thoughtful-making chronicle of an unusual witness of the 20th century.