Celebrity Biographies
Christian Petzold
Christian Petzold (Hilden, Germany, 1960) came to the cinema from writing. A student of Literature and Theater at the University of Berlin, he understood that films could reach the rank of high art thanks to Hitchcock and Truffaut, from whom he inherited his deep sensitivity for celluloid.
This German filmmaker, with a great cultural background, made his big screen debut with Die Innere Sicherheit in 2000: the story of a couple of left-wing terrorists who have been on the run from the police for more than fifteen years and who have a teenage daughter. In this work Petzold demonstrated that his cinema outlines more doubts than answers, that he loves to rethink history and that the composition of his shots communicates almost as much as the dialogues that he himself writes. Furthermore, this film was the first of a trilogy, completed by Gespenster (2005) and Yella (2007), in which this director deals with the theme of displacement.
Then came Jerichow (2008), an unusual romantic drama that explored the problems of a love triangle and which, due to its controversy, divided critics. After this film, Petzold began the historical saga of him with Barbara(2012). Set in Europe in the late 1970s, the film tells the story of Barbara, a doctor who is relegated to a hospital near the Baltic after trying to escape from communist Germany. As it could not be otherwise in the case of this director, the film owes a lot to literature, specifically two novels: “Barbara” by Herman Broch and “Rummerplatz” by Wener Braunig. She was considered a worthy heir to La vida de los otros and received the Silver Bear at the Berlinale in 2012; deserved awards for a work that managed to portray the spirit of a country that, even knowing that it was going to disappear, fought for its future against all logic.
In his next film, Phoenix (2014), Petzold went further back in time and told a story set in Nazism. However, and as is usual with this filmmaker, the film moved away from all the clichés to tell the life of a singer after her ordeal in a concentration camp. This work investigates the consequences of barbarism but from a new perspective; it focuses on the scars that refuse to disappear, that have taken root in the flesh of the person.
In short, Petzold’s cinema focuses on drama, everything folds into it. His films inquire into human suffering in a sincere way, through a slow and static language behind which a series of subterranean tensions are hidden that are the true engine of his work.