TSPDT

Key Production Countries: Germany, France
Key Genres: Drama, Psychological Drama, War, Romance, Romantic Drama, Historical Film, Fantasy, Thriller
Key Collaborators: Hans Fromm (Cinematographer), Bettina Böhler (Editor), Klaus-Dieter Gruber (Production Designer), Florian Koerner von Gustorf (Producer), Stefan Will (Composer), Michael Weber (Producer), Nina Hoss (Leading Actress), Claudia Geisler-Bading (Character Actress), Paula Beer (Leading Actress), Harun Farocki (Screenwriter), Andreas Schreitmüller (Producer), Bettina Reitz (Producer)

"Christian Petzold’s films are like no one else’s. At once intricately engaged with the real world and steeped in film history, they radically reimagine such genres as film noir, thriller, melodrama, and the spy drama, offering narrative mysteries, enigmatic protagonists immersed in even more enigmatic circumstances, an incomparable sense of atmosphere and style, and surprising links between Germany’s turbulent past and its fragile present." - Film at Lincoln Center, 2018

"Like the previous generation’s New German cinema directors, including Alexander Kluge, Rainer Fassbinder, and Margarethe von Trotta, Petzold’s films explore a particular kind of despairing Teutonic identity that is both uniquely German and deeply entangled in the wider images and cultural mythologies of Europe and America—albeit those which have entered into a new Millennial phase of post-Soviet neoliberalism. Petzold’s link to Germany’s countercultural history was literalized in his decades-long collaboration with filmmaker, artist, and theorist Harun Farocki on films Cuba Libre, The State I Am In, Ghosts, and Barbara." - Erik Morse (Document Journal, 2023)

"One of contemporary German cinema’s defining figures, Christian Petzold’s work intricately engages with both reality and fiction whilst being steeped in the history of cinema. A founding member of the loose movement known as the Berlin School, Christian Petzold makes films unlike anyone else. Since his first films made for television in the mid 1990s, Petzold's work has radically reimagined genres such as film noir and melodrama, whilst continually centring narrative mysteries and enigmatic protagonists. From his eloquently titled Love in the Time of Oppressive Systems trilogy to his new trilogy exploring the elements, Petzold has over the past two decades crafted an indelible and singular body of work that marks him out as one of contemporary cinema’s most intriguing filmmakers." - Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2023

"One of the foremost German directors working today, Christian Petzold is a filmmaker of singular vision. Drawing from classic films, Petzold finds inventive ways of reimagining known tropes for modern times as in Transit (2018), a faithful adaptation of Anna Seghers’ novel of the same name that also comments on the obstacles facing asylum-seekers in Europe today." - Le CiNéMa Club, 2023

"Petzold has long stood at the vanguard of the loose filmmaking collective known as the Berlin School. Along with his academically minded peers, he seeks to look at how Germany’s turbulent history ripples through contemporary German life. Rather than craft cinematic fantasies, flattening those tensions into digestible conflicts as the nation’s mainstream exports often do, he’s examined the refractions of that past through the lenses of myth, genre, and narrative." - Marshall Shaffer (Slant Magazine, 2023)

"Petzold studied at Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (dffb, or German Film- and Television Academy), founded in 1966 as West Germany’s first film school and recognized for its independence from the influence of commercial interests. His mentors included filmmakers, media artists, and media theorists Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky, who are both known for their non-narrative films, video work, and film installations in galleries and museums." - Jasmin Krakenberg (Senses of Cinema, 2017)

"I have the feeling that I make films in the cemetery of genre cinema, from the remainders that are still there for the taking." - Christian Petzold (Cineaste, 2008)

"All movies have something to do with Hitchcock. My movies have something to do, always, with each camera position. I am thinking like Hitchcock: there is the look of someone — who’s looking here? — or a look like God, this is objective. He’s so close to cinema as a dream. That’s what cinema always has to be." - Christian Petzold (IndieWire, 2021)