Christian Petzold

Christian Petzold (Phoenix, Transit) continues his rich run of form with the intense romantic fantasy Undine. When we meet Undine, she is being broken up with by her boyfriend who has met someone else. Initially unable to process the…

Reorienting the themes of Hitchcock's binary women-in-peril pictures, Vertigo (1958) and Marnie (1964), Christian Petzold's Phoenix is a fraught, horror-tinged marital drama which builds Sirkian malaise into the construct of a perverted…

The feeling of repression There's a lot going on under the surface in Christian Petzold's slow-burning Barbara, the story of a woman doctor banished from Berlin to the provinces in 1980 East Germany. This winner of several important…

It’s 1980 in the East German provinces and Barbara (magnificently played by Nina Hoss), a doctor, is beginning work at a new hospital. It transpires she has been transferred as punishment for applying for an exit visa from the GDR. Another…