The film explores the life and career of Hannah Arendt, a German political philosopher of Jewish heritage, born in 1906 and passing in 1975. She became a controversial figure after introducing the provocative idea of the “banality of evil” in her 1963 book. This concept emerged from her coverage of the 1961 trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Israel, which she reported on for the New Yorker magazine.