Film at Lincoln Center announces “Christian Petzold In Person,” a seven-film showcase of the renowned German director’s signature works, with most films presented on 35mm. The series will run from March 16 through March 19 with Petzold in person at select screenings, including a sneak preview of NYFF63 Main Slate selection Miroirs No. 3 ahead of its release on March 20. Petzold will also be in person at FLC during the film’s opening weekend for several post-screening Q&As.

A founding member of the loose movement known as the Berlin School, Petzold is one of contemporary cinema’s premier auteurs. With an incomparable sense of atmosphere and style, his films are at once intricately engaged with the real world and steeped in cinema history, depicting enigmatic protagonists immersed in even more enigmatic circumstances. A student of late German filmmaker Harun Farocki and frequent collaborator with such renowned actors as Franz Rogowski, Nina Hoss, and Paula Beer, Petzold reimagines the genres of film noir and melodrama, the thriller and the ghost story, to create works that propose surprising links between Germany’s tumultuous past and its fragile present. Five of Petzold’s films have been selected for the New York Film Festival, and Film at Lincoln Center presented the largest U.S. retrospective of his work to date in 2018.

“Simply put, the films in this series, drawn from Petzold’s back catalog, are all pertinent in one way or another to Miroirs No. 3. Many of Christian’s films can be described as ghost stories, and this selection represents a point of entry for understanding and appreciating the ethereal aspect of his artistic project,” said Dan Sullivan, Programmer at Film at Lincoln Center. “We are delighted to welcome Christian back to FLC to present these enduringly rich works alongside his hauntingly beautiful new film.”

This series will kick off with a pair of Petzold’s films starring the evocative duo of Franz Rogowski and Paula Beer: Transit (NYFF56), following a European refugee who arrives in Marseille assuming the identity of a dead novelist, and Undine (NYFF58), a lush melodrama about a pair of star-crossed lovers linked by an affinity for the water. Additional highlights include 35mm screenings of Petzold’s breakout film The State I Am In; Ghosts, following young nomads on the margins of Europe’s economy; Cold War thriller Barbara (NYFF50); Yella, inspired by the 1962 horror classic Carnival of Souls; and Something To Remind Me, the director’s take on Hitchcock’s Vertigo and the first of his many collaborations with Nina Hoss.

Organized by Florence Almozini, Vice President of Programming, Film at Lincoln Center and Dan Sullivan, Programmer, Film at Lincoln Center. Special thanks to Sara Stevenson, Goethe-Institut/German Film Office; and Tim Grady, Adopt Films.

Tickets go on sale Thursday, February 19 at 2pm, with early access for FLC Members beginning at noon. Tickets for retrospective titles are $18; $15 for students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities; and $13 for FLC Members. See more retrospective titles and save with a 3+ Film Package ($16 for GP; $13 for students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities; and $11 for FLC Members, excluding Miroirs No. 3). Tickets for Miroirs No. 3 are $19; $16 for students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities; and $15 for FLC Members. Learn more here.

FILM DESCRIPTIONS
All films screen at the Walter Reade Theater (165 W. 65th Street)

Opens March 20
Miroirs No. 3
Christian Petzold, 2025, Germany, 86m
German with English subtitles

Miroirs No. 3. Courtesy of 1-2 Special.

In the haunting new film from esteemed German director Christian Petzold, his regular star Paula Beer plays Laura, a pianist from Berlin who finds herself in a transitory state. After surviving a violent car crash that kills her boyfriend, Laura is immediately taken in by Betty (Barbara Auer), a mysterious middle-aged woman who lives alone in an isolated house in the countryside. Strangers to one another, the two women build a quiet, respectful life together, though the reemergence of Betty’s estranged husband and son sheds light on the tragic past that explains the murky present. The pleasurable enigma of Miroirs No. 3, named for a Ravel piano suite, returns Petzold to the metaphysical ambiguity of earlier films like Yella (2007) and the themes of doubling in his cherished Phoenix (2014), yet with a distinctive ethereality all its own: It’s an economical and beautifully crafted work about the mystery of human interaction. An NYFF63 Main Slate selection. A 1-2 Special release. Get tickets!
Thursday, March 19 at 6:00pm (sneak preview) – Q&A with Christian Petzold
Friday, March 20 at 6:15pm – Q&A with Christian Petzold
Saturday, March 21 at 6:00pm – Q&A with Christian Petzold

Barbara
Christian Petzold, 2012, Germany, 35mm, 105m
German with English subtitles

Barbara

Set in 1980, the first chapter of Christian Petzold’s “Love in Times of Oppressive Systems” trilogy centers around a doctor—played by the incomparable Nina Hoss, in her fifth film with the director—exiled to a small town from East Berlin as punishment for applying for an exit visa from the GDR. Planning to flee for Denmark with her boyfriend, Barbara remains icy and withdrawn around her colleagues, particularly with the lead physician (the excellent Ronald Zehrfeld), who is hiding a secret of his own. With her patients, however, the guarded doctor is kind, warm, and protective, even risking her own safety for one of her charges. Masterfully controlled and totally absorbing, this Cold War thriller expertly details the costs of telling and withholding the truth. Courtesy of the Goethe-Institut. An NYFF50 selection.
Wednesday, March 18 at 6:00pm – Q&A with Christian Petzold

Ghosts
Christian Petzold, 2005, Germany, 35mm, 85m
German with English subtitles

Ghosts

The spectral figures at the center of Christian Petzold’s dark, oneiric film (the second in his “ghost trilogy”) are young nomads on the margins of Europe’s economy. Following a violent altercation in a Berlin park, Nina and Toni—two young women drifting between state institutions, foster homes, and menial work programs—forge an ambiguous but tender alliance. But an encounter with a well-to-do French couple convinced that Nina is their long-lost daughter, kidnapped as a toddler, reveals physical and mental scars and exposes them to the cruel indifference of the world. Courtesy of the Goethe-Institut.
Tuesday, March 17 at 9:00pm – Introduction by Christian Petzold

Something To Remind Me
Christian Petzold, 2001, Germany, 35mm, 90m
German with English subtitles

Something To Remind Me

Something To Remind Me marks the first of Christian Petzold’s many collaborations with actress Nina Hoss. It’s also the director’s first variation on Vertigo, reshaping Hitchcock’s classic story of pursuit, manipulation, and doomed obsessions via a seemingly innocent attraction between reserved attorney Thomas and Leyla (Hoss), a lonely blonde woman who’s new in town. But all is not what it appears to be. Dialing back Hitchcock’s romantic impulse and cinematic extravagance, Petzold uses his trademark stylistic rigor and keen eye for human complexity to craft a fragile moral universe all his own. Courtesy of Austrian Filmmuseum.
Thursday, March 19 at 8:30pm – Introduction by Christian Petzold

The State I Am In
Christian Petzold, 2000, Germany, 35mm, 106m
German and Portuguese with English subtitles

The State I Am In

With The State I Am In, Christian Petzold definitively emerged as one of contemporary German cinema’s masters—and one of the preeminent chroniclers of the nation’s recent history. What at first seems like a normal bourgeois European family on vacation is soon revealed to be something far more complex: the couple are former Red Army Faction operatives, on the run since the 1970s. In tow is their rebellious teenage daughter, who hungers for a normal life of boys, cigarettes, and pop music. Perpetually on the lam in a modern Europe that has all but forgotten them, the family finds its old dreams of a revolutionary future fading in the bright glare of the present. Courtesy of the Goethe-Institut.
Tuesday, March 17 at 6:00pm – Q&A with Christian Petzold

Transit
Christian Petzold, 2018, Germany/France, 101m
French and German with English subtitles

Transit

In Christian Petzold’s brilliant and haunting adaptation of German novelist Anna Seghers’s 1944 book Transit, a hollowed-out European refugee (Franz Rogowski), who has escaped from two concentration camps, arrives in Marseille assuming the identity of a dead novelist whose papers he is carrying. He enters the arid, threadbare world of the refugee community, where he becomes enmeshed in the lives of a desperate young mother and son and a mysterious woman named Marie (Paula Beer). Transit is a film told in two tenses: 1940 and right now, historic past and immediate present, like two translucent panes held up to the light and mysteriously contrasting and blending. An NYFF56 selection. A Music Box Films release.
Monday, March 16 at 6:00pm

Undine

Undine
Christian Petzold, 2020, Germany, 90m
German with English subtitles

Christian Petzold’s 2020 feature may have seemed to be a departure for the German director, especially to those only acquainted with his triumvirate of masterful films about the romantic and identity crises of refugees at different points in German history: Barbara (NYFF50), Phoenix, and Transit (NYFF56). Yet Petzold has long been toying with established genres, and with Undine he injects a supernatural element into a melodrama of star-crossed lovers—the title character (Paula Beer), a historian and tour guide at the Berlin City Museum specializing in urban development, and industrial diver Christoph (Franz Rogowski, Beer’s co-star in Transit). Linked by a love of the water, Undine and Christoph form an intense bond, which can only do so much to help her overcome the considerable baggage of her former affair. The story of a contemporary relationship guided by age-old cosmic fate, Petzold’s film contains indelible images of lush romanticism while remaining scrupulously enigmatic. An NYFF58 selection. An IFC Films release.
Monday, March 16 at 8:15pm

Yella
Christian Petzold, 2007, 35mm, Germany, 89m
German with English subtitles

Yella

Inspired by Herk Harvey’s 1962 horror classic Carnival of Souls, Christian Petzold’s final entry in his “ghost trilogy” locates its chills in the cold cruelty of contemporary male-driven business culture. The title character, played with remarkable poise by Nina Hoss, is an eager businesswoman from the former East Germany who discovers that the “good job” she’s just landed in Hanover isn’t as promising as it seems—and that her past life is not so easily left behind. Deftly pivoting between psychological horror and cool realism, Yella is at once an eerie reworking of genre norms and a potent rumination on neoliberal capitalism following the uneven reunification of the two Germanys.
Wednesday, March 18 at 9:00pm – Introduction by Christian Petzold

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