In this informative and measured docudrama, director Margarethe von Trotta (who inherited the project from the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder) relates the life and times of Rosa Luxemburg. Von Trotta based her film on historical research and some of the more than 2,000 letters Rosa Luxemburg wrote during her active life. Luxemburg was a leader of both the German and Polish Socialist parties who advocated an anti-colonialist and pacifist stance on the issues of her day. This drama opens with a shocking prison scene: Rosa is set up for a mock execution while other prisoners are murdered around her. She is eventually released from prison to continue writing, talking, traveling, and exhorting others to join in the Socialist movement. Her lovers, her friends, and historical VIPs wend their way through her life year by year as she fulfills her destiny. Imprisoned on more than one occasion, Rosa did not escape her political enemies; she was assassinated on a January night in 1919 while walking with her friend Karl Liebknecht, who was also murdered.