Barbara - Germany Film Information

17th Busan International Film Festival / Barbara / World Cinema  Film Information

* COUNTRY: Germany

*Running Time: 105min

* Color / Format : 35mm / Color COUNTRY Germany

is without doubt a masterpiece of Christian Petzold. His works share a distinctive style that the characters communicate their emotions through facial expressions and eye movement rather than dialogues. Barbara also demonstrates the psychology of Barbara who is planning to escape East Germany to West Germany through her face instead of lines exchanged between characters or events. Barbara set a plan to escape from the suffocating society of East Germany to West Germany. The first half of the film is filled with depiction of misery and sense of isolation that she feels living in East Germany. While preparing her escape, she meets Stella, a girl from a youth detention center who was forced to be hospitalized, and falls in love with a colleague doctor Andre. These people make Barbara’s decision changed. What if happiness is not in the land over the border but is what you create with people around you? Petzold does not plainly make his point. Instead, he wants the audience to look at Barbara’s situation in the scenes captured in long shot and hopefully empathize with her.

DIRECTOR : Christian PETZOLD

Born in Hilden in 1960, Petzold moved to Berlin in 1981, first studying German, literature and drama at the FU in Berlin, followed by studies at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin from 1988-94, during which time he was assistant director to Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky. Directing his first drama in 1995, his film (2000) received a Gold German Film Award. His films (2004) and (2006) have screened in the Berlinale’s Competition programme.