Barbara

Christian Petzold's Barbara won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin Film Festival in 2012 and was Germany's official Oscar submission for Best Foreign Language Film. Coming after Wolfsburg, Yella and Jerichow, it confirmed Petzold and Nina Hoss as one of the most disciplined actor-director partnerships in contemporary European cinema. Petzold and his co-writer Harun Farocki built the screenplay from extensive interviews with East German doctors who had requested exit visas in the 1980s.

Barbara Wolff (Nina Hoss, in one of the great performances of her career) is a Berlin paediatrician whom the GDR has punished for requesting permission to emigrate: in summer 1980 she is reassigned to a small provincial hospital on the Baltic coast. Under Stasi observation she plans her escape in secret (a Western boyfriend has organised the route via the Danish coast), while the hospital's chief physician (Ronald Zehrfeld) takes a professional interest in her work and a more complicated personal one in her.

The film's central question, whether to honour an attachment that asks her to stay or a freedom that asks her to leave, plays out in small daily decisions: a child patient's care, a medical textbook checked at midnight, a bicycle ride down a forest path. Hans Fromm photographs the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern coastline with a look that is all its own in recent German cinema. Petzold's later Phoenix (2014) is an equally powerful follow-up.