Christian Petzold is a German director known as the modern master of suspense, following Hitchcock. Petzold was born in Hilden, Germany, in 1960 and, after studying German and theater at the Freie Universität Berlin, enrolled in Berlin's German Academy for Film and Television (DFFB), where he studied film direction while working as an assistant director for Harun Farocki and producer Hartmut Bitomsky. After graduation, Christian Petzold made several TV films, like Pilotinnen (1995) and Cuba Libre (1996).
His first feature-film, The State I am In (2000), about a couple of left-wing terrorists, earns the German Film Award, the Hessischer Best Film Award and Best Screenplay at Thessaloniki Film Festival. His following films had their premiere at Berlin Film Festival: Wolfsburg (2003) in the Panorama section, where he won the FIPRESCI Award, Ghosts (2005) and Yella (2007) in the official competition, with this last one, about the portrait of a young woman trying to escape the grip of her violent husband, granting Nina Hoss the Silver Bear for Best Actress. In the following years, he directs Jerichow (2008), Barbara (2012) and Phoenix (2014). Barbara, also starring Nina Hoss, earned him the Best Director award at the Berlinale.
In Petzold’s works, the “Berlin School” filmmaker recursively portrays characters who hide fundamental truths about themselves and find their self divided. Filled with paranoia and anxiety, Petzold's films deal with transient forms of productivity and individuality triggered by the neoliberal economic model, questioning, without resorting to clichés, the working world of “flexibility”.
In 2014, Petzold was a guest at LEFFEST, where he presented Phoenix and was awarded with the João Bérnard da Costa Special Jury Award. Transit (2019), his most recent film, had its premiere at Berlinale, and its pre-release in the last edition of LEFFEST