Christian Petzold at Lincoln Center
FLC Presents Iconic Filmmaker's Signatre Works
By: Susan Hall - Mar 12, 2026
Film at Lincoln Center announces “Christian Petzold In Person,” a seven-film showcase of the German director’s signature works, with most films presented on 35mm. Christian Petzold has said that he always wants to work in Kodak color, the only film stock that can convey his concepts.
The series runs from March 16 through March 19, with Petzold appearing in person at select screenings, including a preview of Miroirs No. 3 before its release on March 20. Petzold will also be at FLC during the film’s opening weekend for several post-screening Q&As.
Miroirs No. 3 refers to a work by Maurice Ravel. Conceptually it fits the film, which centers on a pianist who mirrors the dead daughter of a woman who helps her after an auto accident in which her boyfriend is killed. Petzhold never looks away, the message of painter Gerhard Richetr. In Miroirs he moves to the idea of ‘healing.’
Petzold’s sense of rhythm and forward movement is consummately musical. Many of his films can be described as ghost stories. Engaged in the real world, he is also steeped in film history, which is fun for cineastes and buffs alike.
Petzold tackles the big subject of the past hundred years: the German experience. His work is absorbing, disturbing, and also entertaining. Mysteries abound. Although the films are often intimate and up close, they are not smooth—you are constantly jerked up by the question of who and where you are. Superb filmmaking. His Transit, a Holocaust-exit film set in contemporary times, features a North African boy who might well be one of the children crossing a border today.
The series starts with a pair of Petzold films starring the mesmerizing duo Franz Rogowski and Paula Beer: Transit, following a European refugee who arrives in Marseille and assumes the identity of a dead novelist, and Undine, a lush melodrama about star-crossed lovers linked by an affinity for 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, Yella, inspired by the 1962 horror classic Carnival of Souls; and Something to Remind Me, the director’s take on Vertigo and the first of his many collaborations with Nina Hoss.
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
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
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
The first entry in Christian Petzold’s “ghost trilogy,” Something To Remind Me marks the first of his 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
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
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
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
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
The series runs from March 16 through March 19, with Petzold appearing in person at select screenings, including a preview of Miroirs No. 3 before its release on March 20. Petzold will also be at FLC during the film’s opening weekend for several post-screening Q&As.
Miroirs No. 3 refers to a work by Maurice Ravel. Conceptually it fits the film, which centers on a pianist who mirrors the dead daughter of a woman who helps her after an auto accident in which her boyfriend is killed. Petzhold never looks away, the message of painter Gerhard Richetr. In MIroirs he moves to the idea of ‘healing.’
Petzold’s sense of rhythm and forward movement is consummately musical. Many of his films can be described as ghost stories. Engaged in the real world, he is also steeped in film history, which is fun for cineastes and buffs alike.
Petzold tackles the big subject of the past hundred years: the German experience. His work is absorbing, disturbing, and also entertaining. Mysteries abound. Although the films are often intimate and up close, they are not smooth—you are constantly jerked up by the question of who and where you are. Superb filmmaking. His Transit, a Holocaust-exit film set in contemporary times, features a North African boy who might well be one of the children crossing a border today.
The series kicks off with a pair of Petzold films starring the mesmerizing duo Franz Rogowski and Paula Beer: Transit, following a European refugee who arrives in Marseille and assumes the identity of a dead novelist, and Undine, a lush melodrama about star-crossed lovers linked by an affinity for 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, Yella, inspired by the 1962 horror classic Carnival of Souls; and Something to Remind Me, the director’s take on Vertigo and the first of his many collaborations with Nina Hoss.
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