Christian Petzold is one of the most prominent German directors of the “Berlin School”. He was born in Hilden, in 1960, and, after studying German and Theatre at the Free University of Berlin, he enrolled at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB), where he studied directing while working as an assistant director for filmmaker Harun Farocki and producer Hartmut Bitomsky. After completing his studies, Petzold directed several television films, such as Pilotinnen (1995) and Cuba Libre (1996). In 2000, he directed his first feature-film, The State I Am In, a story about a couple of two German left-wing terrorists, co-written with the master Harun Farocki. 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. Barbara (2012) earned him the award for Best Director at the Berlin Film Festival.
In the work of Petzold, the 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. In 2014, Phoenix won the João Bénard da Costa Jury Award at LEFFEST and, in 2019, the festival paid tribute to the filmmaker by organising a retrospective of his work. Afire (2023) won the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival, and hiis most recent film, Miroirs No. 3 (2025), premiered at the Cannes Film Festival’s Quinzaine des Cineastas, and will be shown in this edition of LEFFEST.
