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Edition 2019
Films
Nelly, a German-Jewish nightclub singer, has survived a concentration camp, but her face was disfigured by a bullet. After undergoing reconstructive surgery, Nelly emerges with a new face and her husband, Johnny, doesn't recognize her. Rather than revealing her identity, Nelly walks into a dangerous game of duplicity and disguise, as she tries to figure out if the man she loves was the one who betrayed her to the Nazis. Evoking the shadows and haunted mood of post-war Berlin, Phoenix weaves a complex tale of a nation's tragedy and of a woman's search for answers, as it builds towards an unforgettable, heart-stopping climax.
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Cast:
Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld, Nina Kunzendorf -
Original Title:
Phoenix -
Country:
Germany, Poland -
Year:
2014 - 98 min Subtitles PT
Director
Christian Petzold
Christian Petzold is a German filmmaker, known as Hitchcock’s successor as master of suspense. In 2000, he directed his first feature-film, The State I Am In, a story about a couple of two German left-wing terrorists, that granted him several awards, of which the German Film Award for Best Film. His next three films premiered at the Berlin Film Festival: Wolfsburg (2003), in the Panorama section, where it won the FIPRESCI award, Ghosts (2005) and Yella (2007, in the official competition. Bárbara (2012) earned him the award for Best Director at the Berlin Film Festival. In the work of Petzold, filmmaker of the “Berlin School”, characters recurrently hide fundamental truths about themselves, thus finding their inner self continuously divided. In paranoia and anxiety, his films tackle forms of productivity and individuality habitual of the neoliberal economic model, questioning the “flexibility” of the labour world, without ever resorting to clichés. His most recent feature-film Undine (2020) won the Silver Bear for Best Actress (Paula Beer) and finds itself competing in the 2020 edition of LEFFEST.
