Berlin School (filmmaking)

Berlin School is a term used for a new movement in German films that has emerged in the early 21st century. The German term Berliner Schule has been applied to a number of intimate German films that received critical acknowledgement, first in France.

A circle of directors of penetrating, realistic studies of relationships and characters informally constitutes the Berlin School. Among these directors are Christian Petzold, Christoph Hochhäusler and Angela Schanelec.

The older directors of the Berliner Schule – Christian Petzold, Thomas Arslan and Angela Schanelec – started filmmaking in the early 1990s. At that time they started to develop the aesthetics of what is now called the Berliner Schule. In 1998, the directors Benjamin Heisenberg, Christoph Hochhäusler and Sebastian Kutzli founded the film magazine Revolver in Munich. They published interviews with certain directors and opened a new discourse about filmmaking aesthetics.

In 2003, the film Milchwald (This Very Moment) by Christoph Hochhäusler was shown at the Berlinale. In 2004, the film Marseille by Angela Schanelec was shown at the Cannes Film Festival. Both films garnered critical acclaim from French film reviewers in Cahiers du cinéma and Le Monde. The French press called the phenomenon the Nouvelle Vague Allemande, while the German press and German audiences initially ignored it. Later they called it the Berliner Schule. This term works as a marketing label, but the films subsumed under that label are very diverse.

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