The Film Library, in collaboration with the Barcelona Film Festival, the Goethe Institute and the Film Library of Catalonia, presents the eleven feature films that constitute the filmography of Germany Christian Petzold, one of today's great filmmakers. Under an appearance of linearity and combining melodrama and distancing, their stories include many layers, readings and resonances, sinuous and spiral narratives, with links between past and present, between History and lower case history. The search and construction of identity, expressed in various ways, it is the great subject of his cinema, populated by confused characters who assume identities that are not their own, let them hide, that are confused with others or have to change their appearance. Romanticism, one of the great sources of German culture, pulsates in his work, not only because love and passion are the drivers of action, but because of the coexistence of reality and myth: romantic heroes and heroines, mythological beings, echoes of Pygmalion or E. T. A. Hoffmann, dead that come back to life, or references to great classic titles, com Vertigo o Casablanca. The cycle includes his last film, Mirrors no.. 3, which premiered fleetingly in Valencia. On Tuesday 26 of May we inaugurate the retrospective of the hand of Clara Gorría and Álvaro Devis, from the podcast “Something new, something old, something borrowed, who will introduce some keys to Petzold's cinema and hold a discussion with the audience after the screening of Phoenix.
Always in transit
Christian Petzold is a key figure of the Berlin School, the generation that, in limbo between the 20th and 21st centuries, transformed the German film landscape with a new approach to narrative cinema. With methodical work based on long-term projects, often in the form of trilogies or complex remakes, and with a network of fixed collaborations—from scripts co-written with Harun Farocki to work with performers such as Nina Hoss—, Petzold has become one of the most unique voices in contemporary European cinema. Like the characters in his films, always in transit, Petzold is mou, with elegance and mystery, between borders and categories. His cinema combines the narrative effectiveness of classic genres such as thriller or the noir with a unique author's look, alternates period films with sober portraits of contemporary problems, But, especially, it makes the realistic record coexist with the more or less explicit irruption of ghosts. At the end of the chapter, contemporary Germany is not a promise besieged by the specters of history?
Catalog of the D'A Barcelona Film Festival
26.05.26 TUESDAY / 18.30 h Presentation of the cycle and discussion with Álvaro Devís and Clara Gorría, del pòdcast “something new, something old, something borrowed”.
27.05.26 WEDNESDAY / 20.15 h
Phoenix
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD. Germany, poland. 2014. VOS SPANISH. Color. 98′. DCP.
Int. Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld, Uwe Preuss, Nina Kunzendorf, Michael Maertens..
Nelly, an Auschwitz survivor, returns to Berlin to end the war. After undergoing a facial reconstruction operation due to the consequences of his time in the field, will try to locate her husband Johnny, who gives her up for dead.
