When people lose something, such as their job or their identity, when their relationships fall apart, when they fall out of their lives, they begin to become ghosts – as director Christian Petzold once said in a film discussion. And in the cinema, we see these ghosts who want to become human again.
Petzold’s own films are also populated by ghosts and shadow beings searching for ways to find their way back to life. They want to set out on new identities, experiencing love, loneliness, connection, longing, disappointment, and thus finding redemption – but unfortunately not always.
At the 52nd International Film Festival Wuerzburg, viewers can immerse themselves in the filmmaker’s world. The festival is dedicating a retrospective entitled “Vom Aufbruch in ein neues Leben” (Starting a new life) to Petzold’s cinematic shadow beings.
Four films will be shown in Wuerzburg:
In Barbara (2012), Nina Hoss plays a doctor in the GDR who is transferred to a provincial hospital after applying to leave the country. There she finds herself caught in an increasingly intense conflict between her desire to leave the GDR and her responsibility as a doctor.
Die innere Sicherheit (The Inner Security) from 2000 depicts a couple (played by Barbara Auer and Richy Müller) who are former left-wing terrorists living underground. Their daughter Jeanne suffers increasingly from the clandestine lifestyle – especially when she falls in love.
Gespenster (2005) tells the episodic story of a day in the life of Nina (Julia Hummer), a disoriented and unattached teenager. She meets Toni, an outsider who naturally makes her an accomplice in pickpocketing, and a woman who believes she recognizes Nina as her daughter who disappeared years ago.
In Transit from 2018, his film adaptation of Anna Seghers’ well-known novel of the same name, set in the present day, Paula Beer and Franz Rogowskis play two refugees who meet in Marseille and plan to flee Europe together with other exiles.
Christian Petzold was born in Hilden in 1960 and studied at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (dffb). To date, he has directed eleven feature films and several television films, for which he also wrote the screenplays – often in collaboration with filmmaker and author Harun Farocki, who died in 2014. He also has long-standing working relationships with several actors and actresses, including Nina Hoss, Paula Beer, Franz Rogowski, and Matthias Brandt.
Christian Petzold has received numerous prizes and awards and is currently considered one of the most important German directors. His films are always minimalist and yet casually full of inner tension: when they tell stories about the past, they are always about the present. Even though they are mostly guided by metaphors and motifs, they show everyday life in a realistic way. Although they open up hidden, complex worlds, they do so by making do with the bare essentials. Petzold loves the genre, but his characters never freeze into pure form; instead, they are always about big emotions.
Petzold is considered an intellectual and eloquent. After the screenings, viewers at the International Film Festival can look forward to exciting discussions about his work.
