Undine

Christian Petzold's Undine won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival in February 2020, Paula Beer's first major international award. Beer had previously appeared in Petzold's Transit (2018) and would extend the collaboration through Afire (2023, also a Silver Bear winner) and Mirrors No. 3 (2025). The Petzold-Beer partnership across these four features is now widely treated alongside the earlier Petzold-Hoss collaboration as one of the central director-actress relationships in twenty-first-century European cinema.

The film is the first part of Petzold's loose trilogy on the elements (Undine (water), Afire (fire) and Mirrors No. 3 (mirrors as a third elemental conceit). The screenplay is by Petzold alone and reframes the German romantic Undine myth) most prominently dramatised in Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's 1811 novella and in operatic form by ETA Hoffmann and Albert Lortzing, as a contemporary Berlin urban-history drama.

The cast pairs Beer with Franz Rogowski (her co-star from Transit) in the male lead and Maryam Zaree, Jacob Matschenz and Anne Ratte-Polle in supporting roles. Cinematography is by Hans Fromm, Petzold's regular collaborator since the early 2000s; the score is by Stefan Will and uses Bach's St Matthew Passion in extended sequences. The film engages directly with the long Berlin urban-history archive (the lectures the central character delivers in the film are based on actual Berliner Stadtschloss / Schlossplatz historical material) and extends Petzold's continuing engagement with the relationship between architecture, memory and the German postwar reconstruction project.