In the fall of 1977, Gudrun Ennslin and two Baader-Meinhof cohorts were found dead in Stammheim prison where they were incarcerated as terrorists. Christine Ennslin thereafter devoted her life to proving that her sister's death was not suicide. Out of their story, Margarethe von Trotta has fashioned a complex fiction. Marianne and Juliane are two daughters of a stern and moralistic minister who is himself haunted by the events of the Nazi era. As adults, the sisters take vastly divergent paths to radicalism. Marianne joins a terrorist group vaguely connected to El Fatah; Juliane, a feminist activist, believes her achievements are being shattered by her sister's bombs. But both of their personalities were molded during the 1950s, the “leaden times” of the film's German title, and the long shadow of their past is explored in the film through flashbacks that lead through icy estrangement and a tortured reunion to the moment when Marianne's death explodes into Juliane's life, changing it forever. With fine performances by Barbara Sukowa as Marianne and Jutta Lampe as Juliane, von Trotta achieves a study of history as it permeates the lives of those individuals who are willing to face it.