TORONTO -- Veteran German director Margarethe von Trotta says the decade-long journey it took to make the drama, Rosenstrasse, was worth it.

The film, set in World War II, arrived in Toronto for a gala film festival screening this week after winning a best actress award in Venice for Katja Riemann.

Rosenstrasse is about a little-known uprising that occurred in 1943 Berlin. A group of so-called Aryan women, whose Jewish husbands had been rounded up by the SS, staged a protest outside the detention centre where their beloved partners had been taken for eventual deportation to the east.

"It really happened, and nobody ever spoke about it," von Trotta, 61, told The Sun yesterday. "Because I think the Germans, after the war, they didn't want to be confronted by the courage (involved). They were cowards, and they didn't want to interfere (at the time) because they said, 'It was too dangerous, nobody could do anything.'

"To look in a mirror at the faces of the women who did something -- and they even had success at it -- nobody wanted to know about it."

While doing research on the project, which came to her attention via a documentary, Resistance In Rosenstrasse, Berlin 1943, von Trotta forced herself to go to Auschwitz, something she had always avoided.

"I was too afraid," said von Trotta. "I knew that it would be so terrible that I couldn't. But it helped me perhaps in the conviction that I had to do the film." People in her generation, she feels, want to try to understand that time that can't be forgotten. "So that is my contribution."

Von Trotta wrote her first draft of the script in 1994, but after she was refused funding from the various German agencies, she rewrote it.

"We were in the time where there was only comedies, comedies, comedies. And they all said, 'Germans are no longer interested,' and 'Who wants to see such a serious film now when everybody wants to laugh?' "

The second draft, which got funding in 2001, focused more on the true story of a little Jewish girl named Ruth, whose mother was taken to the detention centre. Ruth is subsequently taken in by Lena, one of the Aryan wives, who is played by Riemann in the film.

"Ruth was in the documentary film," said von Trotta.

She was interviewed as a grownup, who remembered that as a little girl she was allowed into the detention centre to visit her mother once, and then never again. "So that touched me a lot," said von Trotta.

In fact, through the documentary, filmmaker von Trotta met 10 so-called "contemporary witnesses" to the Rosenstrasse uprising, including two Aryan wives who have since died.

"They were already 88 and 90 years old," said von Trotta. "They are no longer alive now, unfortunately, because they would have been happy to know that the film was finally done."

Incredibly, at one point, von Trotta even found her film competing against an American project about Rosenstrasse supposedly starring a Hollywood actress.

"They even wanted to get the subsidies of German (agencies)," said the director. "I was very fearful, because they said, 'We have Sharon Stone.' That was not true. But they impressed people with this name. And then we said, 'We have to do the film, as Germans, that's our task, to do that. You can't give the money to Americans to do the film.' "


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