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. 35mm print courtesy of the Goethe-Institut/German Film Office.