The State I Am In

Christian Petzold had spent the 1990s making films for German television when Die innere Sicherheit premiered at Venice in September 2000 and then won the Deutscher Filmpreis in Gold for Best Feature Film. Written with Harun Farocki and loosely informed by the afterlives of the Red Army Faction, it took years to finance: advisers reportedly suggested removing the terrorist material altogether, which would have removed the film.

Julia Hummer plays Jeanne, fifteen, who has never had a surname that stayed the same. Her parents, played by Barbara Auer and Richy Müller, are veterans of the armed left living on cash, false documents and the shrinking goodwill of old comrades, and their daughter has been raised inside a discipline she never chose. When the family is forced back to Germany, Jeanne starts doing what any teenager does — wanting things, wanting people — and each ordinary want is a security risk.

The film established the Berlin School's central register, and the terms critics still use for Petzold: patient, cool, deeply interested in people who cannot stop moving. It also began his working relationship with editor Bettina Böhler and cinematographer Hans Fromm, both of whom have shaped every film since. Watched now, its real subject is less German terrorism than the ordinary cruelty of raising a child inside your own convictions.