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. The film consolidated the Petzold-Hoss collaboration (after Wolfsburg, Yella, Jerichow) as one of the most disciplined acting-directorial 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 central performances of her career), a Berlin paediatrician punished by the GDR state for requesting permission to emigrate, is reassigned to a small provincial hospital on the Baltic coast in summer 1980. Under Stasi observation she quietly plans her escape — a Western boyfriend has organised the route through the Danish coast — while the regional hospital's chief physician (Ronald Zehrfeld) takes a quiet professional interest in her work and a complicating personal one in her presence.

The film's central question — whether to honour an attachment that asks her to stay or a freedom that asks her to leave — is staged across small daily decisions: a child patient's care, a medical-textbook reference checked at midnight, a bicycle ride down a forest path. Hans Fromm's photography of the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern coastline produced one of the most distinctive landscape registers of recent German cinema. Petzold's later Phoenix (2014) is the equally powerful follow-up.