Christian Petzold (director)

Christian Petzold (born 14 September 1960) is a German film director.

Born in Hilden and raised in Haan, where he graduated from high school in 1979, Petzold fulfilled his military civil service in a small cinema club of a local YMCA, showing films to troubled adolescents. From 1981 on he lived in Berlin, where he studied theatre and German studies at the Free University of Berlin. From 1988-1994, he studied film at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (dffb).

His first film was Pilotinnen, which he directed for his film school graduation in 1995. In 2005, his film Gespenster was presented at the Berlinale film festival, as was his 2007 film Yella. Petzold writes his own scenarios, often collaborating with Harun Farocki. As his former teacher at dffb, Farocki was a major influence on Petzold, who, along with Angela Schanelec and Thomas Arslan, is generally considered to be part of the Berlin School.

While the Berlin School is often associated with a new turn towards realism and political cinema, Petzold's films, while they address issues of work and employment, also deal with conflicts between life and death. In Gespenster the protagonist leads a ghost-like existence, In Yella the protagonist is, possibly, already dead at the beginning of the film. These three films came to be called the „Gespenster Trilogy“.

The 2008 film Jerichow was his fourth collaboration with Nina Hoss after Something to remind me (German: Toter Mann), Wolfsburg and Yella. The drama concerns a soldier who, having returned from Afghanistan to Prignitz, becomes involved in relationships with married women. The movie was nominated in the main competition at the 65th Venice International Film Festival in 2008. In 2009, Petzold received a 'best director' nomination for the Deutscher Filmpreis award.

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