Hunter Moving Image Alliance is pleased to host a conversation with the filmmaker Christian Petzold.
"Christian Petzold is such a confident and accomplished stylist that his films become all the more effective when the narratives up-anchor from the world as we know it and begin to follow a dream logic of their own. This happens a bit in Ghosts, the 2005 film inspired by a tale from the Brothers Grimm, and quite a lot in Yella (2007), in which a woman does not see her life flash before her eyes at a perilous moment, but instead sees what seems to be a feature-length flash forward to what might have been. Undine, premiering in competition at the Berlinale, is a contemporary reimagining of the myth of the water spirit, the ur-mermaid first dreamed up by the sixteenth-century alchemist Paracelsus and reappearing in literary works by writers as varied as Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué and Ingeborg Bachmann. And of all of Petzold’s theatrical features, Undine is the least moored to reality.
The very first scene hints at things to come, opening just moments after Undine (Paula Beer) has been told by her cad of a boyfriend that he’s found someone else. Her response: “If you leave me, I’ll have to kill you.” - Criterion Collection