PREVIEW: Barbara

Barbara is a departure from distinctive German film-maker Christian Petzold's previous icy thrillers, and is instead an elegant drama based on human and political dilemmas.  Scrupulously even-tempered and set in communist East Germany, it won its director the Silver Bear at Venice, and has since been selected as the German candidate for next year’s foreign-language Oscar.  No doubt the committee hopes to repeat the success of Florian Henckel von Dommersmark’s The Lives of Others, which won the prize in 2007, though this is a slighter work.

The year is 1980, and Barbara, a paediatric surgeon, has applied for an exit visa from the GDR. As punishment for this perceived disloyalty, the authorities banish her from Berlin to a small hospital in the provinces. Still under surveillance, she focuses on work and shuts out her colleagues, biding her time until her lover in the West can spring her out of the country. However their plans start to unravel as she unwittingly forms a bond with a fellow surgeon and several of the patients... A taut mystery-thriller with a love story at heart, deftly combining themes of trust, suspicion and freedom during the Cold War.

This is a film which provides audiences with an impressive layered performance from Nina Hoss, who plays the eponymous East Berlin doctor.   Petzold’s depiction of the East German countryside is all fresh air, warm light and open space: it’s a nice visual counterpoint to the sticky moral climate of mutual suspicion, in which Barbara is tailed by Stasi officers and subjected to humiliating searches. The concrete walls and iron curtains that surround every character are invisible, but they are no less impassable for it.

*The film’s thriller tendencies are buried beneath a more low-key study of love and loyalties as Barbara is pulled between a chance to escape and her concern for her patients* Time Out

*Superb director-actress team offers one of the best German films of the last 10 years* The Art Desk

Watch the trailer below:

Barbara is screening on Tuesday 13th at 2pm, Wednesday 14th at 7.45pm & Thursday 15th at 7.45pm