Ghosts

Made for the Berlinale competition in 2005 and written, like most of Petzold's early work, with the documentarian Harun Farocki, Gespenster is the least seen of his features and the one his admirers argue for hardest. It takes place over a day, a night and the following day in the middle of Berlin, in the flattened, half-built landscape around Potsdamer Platz — a part of the city that in 2005 still looked like a construction site pretending to be a centre.

Julia Hummer, who had carried The State I Am In, plays Nina, sixteen and institutionalised and almost silent; Sabine Timoteo plays Toni, who takes what she needs and is generous with none of it. Marianne Basler is Françoise, a French woman in Berlin for treatment, moving through the same streets with her husband and a fixed idea. Petzold shoots the three of them in daylight and open space, the opposite of the ghost story's usual grammar, and the film's title refers to people who cannot be seen by the systems around them as much as to anything supernatural.

It won the German Film Critics Association's Best Feature prize and has since acquired the reputation of a lost film that never really was one — reissued in retrospectives, cited by Petzold himself as the picture where his method settled. Watch it between The State I Am In and Yella and the trilogy's logic becomes obvious.