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This chapter analyzes the films of Christian Petzold. Over the past twenty years and across eleven feature-length works, Petzold has established himself as the most critically acclaimed director in Germany. Five of his last eight films have won Best Film from the Association of German Film Critics (2001, 2005, 2007, 2008, and 2012). It is not only the critics, however, who admire Petzold's work: his breakthrough The State I Am In (Die innere Sicherheit; 2000) won the Federal Film Prize in Gold, the equivalent of a best-film prize for its year, an unusual recognition for an art-house film. His films consistently explore new and transformational modes of individualities, especially the compromised, even tainted, character of desire in the wake of economic adaptability, accommodation, and mobility. This kind of adaptability, productive desire, and subsequent movement are emphatically historicized in Petzold's cinema, in which history regularly intrudes upon individuals' dreams, fantasies, and desires as well as the spaces they inhabit.

This chapter presents an interview with filmmaker Christian Petzold. Petzold is considered one of the leading directors of contemporary German cinema. Making his feature debut with the political drama The State I Am In (2000), his other works include Wolfsburg (2003) and Ghosts (2005). Petzold's films are marked by their interest in psychology and characters whose lives have been somehow torn loose from their moorings. The present interview took place around the release of Barbara (2012), Petzold's best-received work to date. The film is a low-key account of a female doctor whose application for an exit visa from the GDR sees her transferred to a small rural community as punishment. The interview covered topics such as the research he conducted to prepare for Barbara; how he approached the theme of love in the film; and the locations used when shooting the film.

This chapter considers the ways in which two postmillennial portrayals of the GDR, Dominik Graf's Der rote Kakadu/The Red Cockatoo (2005, Germany) and Christian Petzold's Barbara (2012, Germany), each attempts to reimagine the East German past: the early 1960s in Graf's film, the early 1980s in Petzold’s. These two twenty-first century films mark an important shift in representations of the German Democratic Republic. Unlike films of the 1990s (such as Das Versprechen/The Promise, Margarethe von Trotta, 1995, Germany), which cast their protagonists as victims of history, both Dominik Graf and Christian Petzold place their characters in a position in which they must choose whether to stay in or leave the GDR. This, in fact, connects them to GDR-era films such as Der Geteilte Himmel/ Divided Sky (Konrad Wolf, 1964, GDR). As different as they are from each other, these two films allow for a higher degree of differentiation between representations of the GDR than had previously been the case.

This chapter presents an interview with Christian Petzold, which mainly took place in July 2011, with a shorter followup in October 2012, at Petzold's office in Berlin. Topics covered include where Petzold grew up; the first film he can remember seeing in a movie theater; the atmosphere in Berlin when he arrived to study literature; his decision to transfer to the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin; his collaborations Harun Farocki; how he finds Farocki's nonfiction films; the impression left by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany in 1990; and the influence of genre films such as Detour on Cuba Libre, Near Dark on The State I Am In, and Driver on Wolfsburg on his own films.