Christian Petzold on Berlin Film Festival Scandal and His New Film

In his low-key way, the German director Christian Petzold has put together a remarkable filmography — and his new movie, “Miroirs No. 3,” is among his oddest and most compelling visions yet.

In “Miroirs,” which opens in New York and Los Angeles March 20 after playing Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight last year, the actress Paula Beer plays Laura, a talented pianist who experiences a terrifying car wreck in the German countryside and is taken in by a family of bystanders. Slowly, Laura comes to realize that her hosts are treating her as a surrogate for the daughter they lost, and must try to reconcile her feelings about the ways she and this new family are using one another.

It’s an admittedly small-scale story for a director best-known for films like “Phoenix,” the acclaimed 2014 film confronting German culpability in the Holocaust — but it’s told with warmth and humanity. In conversation during his visit to New York to promote the film, Petzold is much the same, discussing the weight of history that hangs over Germans, the recent scandals around the Berlin Film Festival (where his films have long had a home), trying to make his way in a national movie industry that was stunted by decades of repression and his own family’s history with Nazism. For this director, the past is always present, even as, in his newest film, it’s family history, not national history, that’s at issue.

You’ve directed several films set against the upheaval of German history — World War II and its aftermath — and exploring German national guilt and trauma. That all feels less present here; what did stepping into a more personal story mean for your filmmaking? 

I’ve made three period pictures. The last period picture I made was “Transit” [an adaptation of a 1944 novel, adapted to be set in the present day]. It was a contemporary movie, but the period signs are there. 

It has something to do with my life in Berlin, because, in Berlin, you have stones on the street in front of houses. On these iron stones are the names of people who had lived in these houses and were killed by Nazis in Auschwitz or other concentration camps. When you’re going through Berlin, you have our present time and signs of [past] murder and fascism in the same moment. 

For me, I have the impression that when I’m standing in front of a house and I’m reading the words on one of these iron stones reading the names, the date of birth, and the date when they are killed, I have the feeling that in this house are not the ghosts of the past, but that I am a ghost of the present. 

How did it color your evolution as an artist to have grown up surrounded by this history, and to have parents and grandparents who lived through it? 

My parents were five or six years old when the war was over, and they have memories to do with fear, traumatized by bombs, traumatized to be a refugee. My mother — her mother was raped in the last days of the war in Czechoslovakia. On the other side, the father of my mother was an S.S. officer, in the bunker of Hitler. The German word is Leibstandarte — the elite group of the S.S. 

Wow.

We had never talked about this guy. He was killed in May 1945 by the Russians, in Berlin. He was a killer. We never talked about it. There was no reflection about the guiltiness — when you were asking Germans, Have you been a member of the Nazi Party?, nobody was a member of the Nazi party. I don’t know the word in English, which comes from Sigmund Freud, when you put something away…

Repression? 

That’s the right word, repression. Children have a fantastic sensibility. When you’re sitting with other children in a room and the adults are talking, you feel exactly when they are lying, when their voice is not okay. It’s like when you see a bad movie with bad dialogue — to see the grandmother and grandfather talking about their time during fascism, they are lying. They repress everything. But what is under repression? It comes out, sometimes like a shock, sometimes like a monster. This has something to do with my movies.

I’ll say: In “Miroirs,” the characters are hiding from reality, thinking their precarious situation as a surrogate family can go on forever. There’s a truth they are hiding from.

That’s right. I’m a real son of my parents and grandparents that I made a mistake in the script. The final scene in the script was totally different from the final scene you can see now in the movie. At the end of the script, she’s coming back as a daughter to the family, and wants to live there as a daughter. The writer in my soul tried to harmonize the world. But it’s not possible.

We might wish it were! But it’s not true to life. 

Because cinema is always about truth, you can see the lie in cinema much better than in literature. And when we are at the editing table, editing the final scene, I knew it was a big mistake. It was a desire of harmonizing my world. So we had to shoot the final scenes again. 

You work with performers repeatedly: Paula Beer has now been in several of your films, and Nina Hoss had previously. What do you think of the term “muse”? 

When I was at the Berlinale in 2012 with the film “Barbara,” a journalist asked me if Nina Hoss is my muse. I know she will hate that, and I hate that too. She was sitting beside me and she makes [winces] Oh, no — that reaction. And I said, “A muse is, for me, half-naked and from Austria, and she is not my muse.” 

I remember that when I have written [2000 debut feature] “The State I Am In” with Harun Farocki, in the first draft, they don’t have a daughter. They have a son. And it was me in the character of the son. Harun changed it to a daughter, and from this moment on, I have a distance in this daughter, or the characters Nina has played, or Paula. These are not my muses. They are not myself. There is a distance. I’m looking at them, I’m interested, I’m curious, but I don’t want to fuck them, and I don’t want to be them. 

Can we talk about sustaining a career over decades and pulling together financing? Has making films gotten easier or harder? 

It’s getting easier. When I finished my studying at the Academy of Film, I know that this German film world… It’s not a world like in Hollywood. When I came to New York, I watched “Casablanca” on the plane, and in the credits, you can see that one of the editors was Don Siegel. I think, Don Siegel — “Dirty Harry.” [Siegel worked on “Casablanca” before directing many films, including “Dirty Harry.”] There is something that you have, a line of fathers and mothers of the cinema. In Germany, the generation who educate the next generation, this is totally destroyed because of the fascism between ‘33 and ‘45. Everybody who could be my father or my mother in filmmaking had to leave Germany, or was killed by the Germans. We don’t have a real film industry — not the financial [infrastructure] nor an industry of morality. It took us 30 years until Wim Wenders and [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder created something. 

What Fassbinder has made is something I want to follow. He had the same crew behind the camera; he had an ensemble of actors. He had not so much money, but he made many, many movies, because he knew how much money he had. This I want to create for myself. I always ask the producer, This is the story for the next movie. How much money can I expect? And when he says two-and-a-half million, I’m writing for two-and-a-half million. 

“Miroirs” played Cannes, but prior to that, you were a regular at the Berlinale; you’ve won prizes there, and served on the jury in 2024 — the first iteration of the festival after the events of Oct. 7, 2023. This winter, artists felt the festival’s leadership ought to be speaking out about the war in Gaza. What do you make of the festival’s leadership? 

The Berlinale was, in earlier days, in summer. There were many, many stars from the U.S. — Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, and so on. Then they changed it to February. February is a very cold and ugly month in Germany, in a very cold and ugly place in Berlin, Potsdamer Platz. And the Oscars changed [moving earlier in the schedule, such that the Berlinale now falls during campaign season] — therefore, no, not so many stars are coming. 

And Berlin wants stars there, to be competitive.

And then they try to make it the political festival. So this festival is not about stars, it’s about themes. It’s about subjects. It’s about political things. For me, this I don’t like so much, because this means that the movies are a medium for something else. And movies are not a medium. Movies are more questions than answers. 

And then we had many, many people onstage in the time when I was on the jury. We have people in from Gaza, and they were onstage and said they wanted to have a ceasefire. And the Germans had a big problem. [The Germans] are the killers; they made the Holocaust. And now they want to be the good guys. So, therefore, they say that antisemitism is the worst thing in the world. And it is. It’s the worst thing. Terrible. But there is a quotation by [philosopher Theodor] Adorno — he says that a philosemite is an antisemite who’s loving Jews. Now they want to be philosemites. 

You had previously signed an open letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Would you go back to the festival? 

Yeah, I have no problem with the Berlinale. But I was there five times in competition. I’m living in Berlin, and sometimes you have to leave. I’m older than 60 years old. Sometimes you have to leave your parents and find a new place in the world. 

I was so touched by Cannes, because the audience was so respectful — they are also interested in politics, but not asking questions of politics the way I was confronted with when doing the Berlinale. 

I imagine trying to discuss the particular politics embedded within a film is different from being asked about questions of global import. 

Yes, that’s right. I have my two children — they’re left-wing, radical left-wing. I must say they’re well-educated. And when they saw “Miroirs,” they said, “Great movie. We like it, Daddy. But can you make the next movie more political?” I said, “But ‘Miroirs No. 3’ is political.” “Oh, no, we don’t believe you! Please explain this to us!” 

I said, “Okay, we are living in a capitalistic world. Everything we use, we throw away when it doesn’t work anymore. And you can make a divide between two kinds of movies. There are movies that want to destroy something. And we have movies that show us how to repair something after destruction. Both movies are political. Now, in our situation with Trump and Putin and the wars, we have to think about repairing the world. And ‘Miroirs’ is a small movie about how to repair something.”