The Seventh Room

The film tells the life of Edith Stein. She was born into a Jewish family, studied philosophy and worked alongside Edmund Husserl. She then converted to Catholicism and became a Carmelite nun; the name she took in the convent was Teresa Benedicta. In 1942 she and her sister Rosa were taken by the Gestapo and killed at Auschwitz. The film tells this not as a plain life story but in an expressionist form. Faith and origin meeting in the same person is the real subject. Stein was declared a saint in 1998. Maia Morgenstern plays Edith Stein in Márta Mészáros’s hundred and ten minute film, a joint Italian and Hungarian production, completed in 1996.