Red Love

Red Love (German: Rote Liebe) is a 1982 German documentary film directed by Rosa von Praunheim. The film, divided in two interspersing completely different segments, deals with two women deprived of independence for many years because of either their family obligations or an authoritarian spouse. One segment is a documentary interview; the other is a fictional tale.

The fictional narrative, made in the style of an early 20th century morality play, is based on Red Love (1927), a novel by Alexandra Kollontai, a feminist writer who was the first Soviet ambassador to Norway. It tells the story of a young woman Vassilissa (Sascha Hammer) who breaks with her early ideals to enter into a conventional bourgeois marriage and learns how to stand up to her womanizing husband (Mark Eins).

The second part is a documentary about Helga Goetze, a West German woman in her fifties, who after thirty years of a sexually boring marriage, left her husband and their seven children to join the Otto Muehl Commune in Vienna in order to live a life of sexual freedom. She became radicalized and oversexed claiming that all she wants to do is to have sex. While advocating for sexual liberation, she holds outrageous sexual ideas.