Phoenix

Christian Petzold's Phoenix is the most celebrated of the six features he made with Nina Hoss, the long collaboration that came to define a strand of post-Wall German art cinema. Loosely adapted from Hubert Monteilhet's 1961 novel Le retour des cendres — and unmistakably indebted to Hitchcock's Vertigo — the film was shot in Berlin and Wrocław in late 2013 and premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2014.

Hoss plays the central role; Ronald Zehrfeld, who had appeared opposite her in Petzold's Barbara, plays her husband; Nina Kunzendorf rounds out the trio. The cinematography is by Hans Fromm, Petzold's regular collaborator, who shoots Berlin's bombed-out streetscapes and the Phoenix nightclub of the title in deep shadow and saturated colour. The script was the last that Petzold wrote with Harun Farocki, the documentarist and theorist who had been his mentor at the DFFB film school; Farocki died shortly before the film's release, and Petzold has spoken often of the loss.

The film won the German Film Critics Award for Best Film and the Bavarian Film Award for Best Direction, and is now widely treated as a touchstone of the so-called Berlin School. Its closing sequence is among the most analysed in twenty-first-century European cinema, written about repeatedly in Sight & Sound, Cahiers du Cinéma and the academic literature on postwar German memory.