- Born
- Height6′ 2″ (1.88 m)
- Christian Petzold was born in Hilden in 1960. After studying German and Drama at the Freie Universität Berlin, he enrolled in Berlin's German Academy for Film and Television (DFFB). There he studied film direction while at same time working as an assistant director to Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky. After graduation, Christian Petzold made several interesting TV films. In 2000, his first theatrical feature, The State I Am In (2000), about a couple of left-wing terrorists, is released and makes a strong impression and earning its director both the German Film Award and the Hessischer Best Film Award. By 2012, this prolific creator has managed to make two more TV films and five additional features, among which Yella (2007), the sensitive portrait of a young woman who tries to escape the grip of her violent and possessive husband, and especially Barbara (2012), which won the 'Best Director' award at the Berlinale. This fine drama plunges the viewer into the everyday life atmosphere of the GDR like few films before and serves as a showcase for its director's talents.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Guy Bellinger
- SpouseAysun Bademsoy(? - present) (2 children)
- Studied at the German Academy of Film and Television in Berlin from 1988 to 1994. During that time, he also worked as an assistant director for Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky.
- Has lived in Berlin since 1981.
- Has a son and a daughter.
- Considered one of the leading directors of the Berlin School, a movement of young German filmmakers, shooting ambitious independent movies.
- [on Nina Hoss] Nina is an incredible ensemble player. She can throw out everything superfluous, and that produces something fantastic.
- This is what cinema should be about: it should be about people in transit. Home is for television.
- If we want to move on, first we have to remember.
- [on Transit and transposing the setting from mid-20th-century to the present day] The transit space that is described by Anna Seghers in her book is a horizontal space, it is a geographical space, it is the space between Europe and the United States. They are in the port city, and thus the space between the land where we are and the sea we want to travel over. So this is the horizontal transit space. But I think that there is also a vertical kind of transit space, and that is time, and the stories that develop over time. And so we not just find ourselves between the United States and Europe, or between land and water, but we also find ourselves trapped in yesterday's time and today... we, in today's world, haven't really made any progress as compared to the past. So it's not people from the past that are ghosts-it is we that are so much more ghost-like.
- Cinema has something to do with fever, with dreams. The Lumière brothers started cinema the same year that Sigmund Freud found out how dreams work.
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