Barbara Sukowa (born 2 February 1950, Bremen, Germany) is a German theatre and film actress.

Sukowa's stage debut was in Berlin in 1971, in a production of Peter Handke's Der Ritt über den Bodensee. Günter Beelitz invited her to join the ensemble of the Darmstädter National Theatre in the same year. She also worked in Frankfurt am Main and Hamburg, in collaboration with directors such as Luc Bondy and Ivan Nagel. Her roles included Marion in Büchner's Danton's Death and Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Other Shakespeare roles in Europe were Rosalind in As You Like It and Desdemona in Othello. Sukowa also performed in Ibsen's The Master Builder. In English, she has worked in a production of The Cherry Orchard (Princeton, New Jersey, 2000).

In addition to her stage work, Sukowa is well known for her performances in films from the New German Cinema. She portrayed Mieze in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), which earned her the German best young actress award. Her performance of the title role in Fassbinder’s Lola earned her a German Film Awards (Gold) award. Her performance in Margarethe von Trotta’s film Die bleierne Zeit (Marianne and Juliane, 1981) earned her a best actress award at the Venice Film Festival. In 1985 she appeared in the mini-series Space based on James A Michener's novel. She received best actress honours at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival for her work in von Trotta's film Rosa Luxemburg.

Margarethe von Trotta (born 21 February 1942, Berlin) is a German female film director and a "leading force" of the New German Cinema movement.She is regarded as “the world’s leading feminist filmmaker.” Her films are more concerned with “feminine aesthetics” than with an upfront exploration of “political action” like that of her fellow German female filmmakers. The connections between females within her work all have a serious tone that seems to be a bit “tortured.” But, she rejects the term “women’s films” to label her work. Many of von Trotta’s full-length films have been matched up to Ingmar Bergman’s features from the 1960s and 70s, which is no small feat. She claims that, thanks to seeing Bergman’s work, she “ ‘fell in love’ with the medium and its possibilities for representing inner psychic worlds.” On top of that, she boasts an impressive body of work that has won her awards all over the world in the last forty years.

She was married to and collaborated with director Volker Schlöndorff. Although they made a great team in the filmic realm, von Trotta felt she was seen as secondary to Schlöndorff. These feelings led to von Trotta making a solo career for herself and becoming “Germany’s foremost female film director, who has offered the most sustained and successful female variant of Autorenkino in postwar German film history.” The predominant theme of von Trotta’s films is to create a new representation for females.

Johanna “Hannah” Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 4, 1975) was a German American political theorist. She has often been described as a philosopher, although she refused that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular." She described herself instead as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact that "men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world". Arendt's work deals with the nature of power, and the subjects of politics, authority, and totalitarianism.

Arendt was born into a family of secular German Jews in the city of Linden (now part of Hanover), and grew up in Königsberg (the birthplace of Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant, renamed as Kaliningrad and annexed to the Soviet Union in 1946) and Berlin.

At the University of Marburg, she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger. According to Hans Jonas, her only German-Jewish classmate, Arendt embarked on a long and stormy romantic relationship with Heidegger, for which she was later criticized because of Heidegger's support for the Nazi party when he was rector of Freiburg University.

Steven Andrew Soderbergh (/ˈsoʊdərbɜrɡ/; born January 14, 1963) is an American film producer, screenwriter, cinematographer, editor, and an Academy Award-winning film director. He is best known for directing critically acclaimed commercial Hollywood films like Out of Sight, Erin Brockovich and Traffic, and the remake of Ocean's Eleven. He has also directed smaller, less conventional works, such as Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Schizopolis, Bubble, The Girlfriend Experience and Che. His most recent works are Contagion and Haywire.

Soderbergh was born in Atlanta, the son of Mary Ann (née Bernard) and Peter Andrew Soderbergh, who was a university administrator and educator. His paternal grandfather was a Swedish immigrant, from Stockholm. When he was a child, his family moved from Atlanta to Charlottesville, Virginia, where he lived during his adolescence, then moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where his father became Dean of Education at Louisiana State University (LSU). There he discovered filmmaking as a teenager, directing short Super 8 mm films with equipment borrowed from LSU students.

Anke Christina Fischer (née Engelke; born 21 December 1965) is a German comedian, actress and voice-over actress born in Montréal, Quebec, Canada.

Engelke moved to Cologne in 1971 with her parents. Early on, she exhibited singing talent, and was discovered in 1978 by Georg Bossert at a performance of her school's choir.

From 1979 to 1986, she was the presenter of the daily children's television show broadcast from the Funkausstellung (a German radio exhibition, held every other year in Berlin), and the weekly children and youth's sports magazine show Pfiff. From 1978 to 1980, she hosted the show Moment mal (Wait a minute) on RTL. SWF3 first brought her on board in 1986 as an editor; later on, she was the presenter there until 1998. She has sung with Fred Kellner und die famosen Soul Sisters since 1989. Since 1993, she has been part of the SWF3-Comedy-Ensemble Gagtory.

From 1994 to 2000, Engelke was married to the keyboardist Andreas Grimm with whom she has a daughter. Currently she is married to musician Claus Fischer with whom she has two sons.