Christian Petzold is a German filmmaker, known as Hitchcock’s successor as master of suspense. In 2000, he directed his first feature-film, The State I Am In, a story about a couple of two German left-wing terrorists, that granted him several awards, of which the German Film Award for Best Film. His next three films premiered at the Berlin Film Festival: Wolfsburg (2003), in the Panorama section, where it won the FIPRESCI award, Ghosts (2005) and Yella (2007, in the official competition. Bárbara (2012) earned him the award for Best Director at the Berlin Film Festival. In the work of Petzold, filmmaker of the “Berlin School”, characters recurrently hide fundamental truths about themselves, thus finding their inner self continuously divided. In paranoia and anxiety, his films tackle forms of productivity and individuality habitual of the neoliberal economic model, questioning the “flexibility” of the labour world, without ever resorting to clichés. His most recent feature-film Undine (2020) won the Silver Bear for Best Actress (Paula Beer) and finds itself competing in the 2020 edition of LEFFEST.
