Events

[SCREENING] You may not know the name, but Christian Petzold is generally acknowledged to be the preeminent German filmmaker of modern times. He is linked to the “Berlin School,” a group of filmmakers who, like those of the French New Wave in the 1950s, were linked by their participation in a film journal, Revolver, where they explored their influences and developing aesthetic. You may have seen his Oscar-nominated Barbara (2012), about a doctor banished to a rural station where she is monitored by the Stasi, or Phoenix (2014), his most recent film, about a woman disfigured in a Nazi concentration camp who after the war sets out to determine if the man she loved betrayed her trust: both played theaters locally.

Thanks to Cultivate Cinema Circle, over the next few months you can catch up with his equally acclaimed previous films in Lonely Ghosts: The Early Cinematic Work of Christian Petzold. The series opens this week with his 2000 breakthrough film, The State I Am In. The plot is similar to the American film Running On Empty: a couple that has lived in hiding from the government for fifteen years, since their participation in a terrorist operation, now must deal with the needs of their teenaged daughter to live her own life. A compelling drama in its own right, it displays themes that are central to much of Petzold’s work, particularly characters who have to live at odds with their true natures. Upcoming films in the monthly series include Ghosts (2005), Yella (2007), and Jerichow (2008).