Yesterday Girl

A practicing lawyer and author before he began teaching film, Alexander Kluge based this, his first feature film, on his own story, “Anita G.,” and cast his own sister, Alexandra Kluge, in the lead role. She plays Anita G., a Jewish refugee from East Germany. After a jail sentence for shoplifting, she drifts into occasional prostitution, relationships, and possibilities of employment, harassed and frustrated by officialdom and the empty promises of social workers. Yesterday Girl won six prizes at the 1966 Venice Film Festival, and with Volker Schlöndorff’s first feature, Young Törless (1966), helped establish New German Cinema internationally.