Director and author Helke Sander is an icon of both New German Cinema and the women's rights movement. Historical upheavals sometimes only take a small impulse that suddenly sets grid-locked conditions in motion. Helke Sander provided such an impulse when she declared in a legendary speech at a delegates' congress of the SDS in 1968 that social change was not possible without the liberation of women. All her films bear witness to this. Even in old age she is militant and not uncontroversial among young activists. (Livia Theuer)