"Average German citizen Katharina Blum (Angela Winkler) spends the night with a man she barely knows. The next morning, Katharina finds the man gone--and finds herself surrounded by none-too-polite police investigators. It seems that her stranger of the evening was a political activist who has long been the object of close scrutiny by the law. Her basic civil rights ignored at every turn, Katharina is relentlessly grilled about her relationship with her one-night stand. As a result, Katharina loses her job, her friends, and her standing in the community. Unsatisfied with this, the police go after Katharina's family, putting her ailing mother through an emotional wringer. After being branded a Communist by the insensitive press, Katharina goes over the top and shoots a reporter: at last, she has truly become what the media has made of her. Based on a novel by Heinrich Böll and directed with clinical near-detachment by Volker Scholendorff and Margarethe von Trotta, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum was later remade for American TV as The Lost Honor of Katherine Beck, with Marlo Thomas in the title role."