Watch Ein Leben (1980) Official Trailer

Using photos and letters that the director found in a landfill, she reconstructs in her documentary film the life of Maria Bartel, a Berlin baker born in 1902 who, as the director comments in voice-over, "was in the prime of her life during fascism." In 1920, she moved from the East Prussian province to Berlin with her first husband. After his suicide, she opened a bakery, which she ran until the end of the war in 1945, raised her son, and now has various relationships and love affairs.