Pam Katz, a screenwriter who lives in Park Slope, has been nominated for a Lola,  Germany’s version of the Academy Award, for the film Hannah Arendt. 

Katz co-wrote the screenplay with renowned director Margarethe Von Trotta. The film’s star, Barbara Sukowa, who also lives in Brooklyn, was nominated for her incredible turn as the German philosopher. Six nominations in all, the film was cited for Best Film, Best Direction, Best Screenwriting, Best Actress, Best Costume and Best Make-up.

The film, which is a huge hit in Germany, will open at the Film Forum in Manhattan on May   29 ,2013. It explores a turbulent  four-year period in the life of the great philosopher and writer, Hannah Arendt. Beginning in New York at The New School, where Arendt taught after having escaped from a French detention camp, the film moves to Jerusalem, where she covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker and coined the phrase “the  banality of evil” in her article (and later book) Eichmann in Jerusalem. 

Von Trotta and Katz make thrilling drama of the backlash against Arendt’s writing about the trial and her “banality of evil” theory. Co-starring Janet McTeer as author and Arendt confident Mary McCarthy.

Writing in Der Spiegel, Elke Schmitter writes, 

Can men really be trusted? This classic question is the subject of the opening dialogue in director Margarethe von Trotta’s new film “Hannah Arendt,” which got its official release in Germany this week after screening at the Toronto International Film Festival and revolves around a less classic question: Was Adolf Eichmann, the organizer of the “final solution of the Jewish question,” a monster or an efficient bureaucrat, a pathological creature or the embodiment of the banality of evil? Her theory of the “banality of evil” turned Arendt, a German Jew who became a college professor and distinguished author of philosophical works in the United States, into a controversial international figure in the early 1960s, more ostracized and hated than revered.