Christian Petzold Directs "Barbara," Starring Nina Hoss Christian Schulz Christian Petzold directing Nina Hoss in "Barbara," about a doctor sent to East Germany's remote provinces in 1980. Adopt Films Ronald Zehrfeld, facing Nina Hoss in Christian Petzold's "Barbara," plays a colleague of her character who may or may not have Stasi connections. BORN in 1960 to parents who had just emigrated from East to West Germany, the director Christian Petzold spent his first few months at a refugee camp near Düsseldorf. He has lived in the West all his life, but when he started making films in the "90s he found himself drawn to unfamiliar environments, which often meant the former East. "You have to be a little bit of a stranger," Mr. Petzold said, smoking a cigarette in his book-lined office in the Kreuzberg neighborhood here one October morning. You have to go to other places to let the pictures in your head get in contact with reality. For Mr. Petzold the East has always provided not just distance but also, paradoxically, a sense of proximity. "I felt in these people who came from a society that doesn't exist anymore some reminders of my parents," he said. His latest film, "Barbara," opening Dec. 21, is set in 1980 in the East German provinces, where the title character, a doctor played by Mr. Petzold's regular star Nina Hoss, has been banished as punishment for seeking an exit visa. Barbara proceeds through this atmosphere of universal suspicion as if wearing a suit of armor. She's drawn to a sympathetic colleague (Ronald Zehrfeld), but is he a Stasi informant? Germany's Oscar submission in the foreign-language category, "Barbara" also represents a subtle challenge to cinematic depictions of the East, which was officially known as the German Democratic Republic. Films from and about East Germany constitute a shadow realm within the larger world of German cinema. In its nearly half-century existence DEFA, the East German state-run studio, produced some 750 fiction features, from socialist-realist dramas to science-fiction spectacles, and many more documentaries. But with a few exceptions - the early noir "The Murderers Are Among Us," the postwar drama "I Was 19" - most are now long forgotten. The New German Cinema of the "70s, which turned Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and others into international stars, was a West German phenomenon. Almost all of Germany's major filmmakers today hail from the West; the handful of prominent Easterners include the documentarian Thomas Heise, whose 2009 film "Material" is an elegiac chronicle of the German Democratic Republic in its final days and beyond, and Andreas Dresen, who has won festival acclaim with films like "Cloud 9." Meanwhile the most popular movies about life in the East have fit within established genres: the cloak-and-dagger melodrama "The Lives of Others" (2006) and the culture-clash comedy "Good Bye Lenin!" (2003), a prime example of the tendency known as Ostalgie, a semi-kitschy nostalgia for the old East. With "Barbara" Mr. Petzold said he took pains to avoid what he considered the clichéd iconography of East Germany: "the Wall and the soldiers in gray, the basement prisons, the re-education camps." He added, "It would be like making advertisements if I re-enact something everybody knows, so the audience can say, "Oh, I recognize this." " He wanted to capture the sensory particulars of life as it was lived - the colors of the foliage he remembered from childhood trips, the sounds of the wheezing two-cylinder Trabant cars - and something more ineffable, the malaise of a broken society increasingly distant from its historical ideals. As he put it: "What happens to dreams when they change into nightmares or change into nothing? What happens to people then? Most movies deal with the past by isolating and simplifying it, but it is in Mr. Petzold's nature to complicate things. In films like "Yella" (2007), about a woman from the East seeking her fortune in the West, and "Jerichow" (2009), about a love triangle made even knottier by money and race, the steely focus on the fault lines of present-day Germany reveals the unsettled traumas of the past. "Barbara," his first period movie, reverses the dynamic. Mr. Petzold said that in discussions with the filmmaker Harun Farocki, his professor at film school and now a writing partner, Mr. Farocki told him: "We've made movies where the past is like an infection. Now we make a period picture where the present is the infection. Marco Abel, a professor of English and film studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, who has written extensively on German cinema, said in an e-mail that "Barbara" "is ultimately about the present, not the past." He added: "The questions it raises - with whom do we identify and why? - are political in a way that is typical for Petzold's work. The answers are different than if the film had been released in 1990. Why do we perhaps today hope that this relationship will work out in the G.D.R.? What does this hope reveal about our own desires? Intricately engaged with the real world, Mr. Petzold's movies are also steeped in film history. Before each shoot he organizes a screening series for his cast and crew. Reference points for "Barbara" included period films he deemed "totally modern," he said, like Stanley Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon" and Jean Renoir's "Marseillaise." The connections are often indirect: Rosselini's "Stromboli" for the comportment of Ingrid Bergman's exiled heroine; Hawks's "To Have and Have Not" for its portrayal of a romance forced by circumstances to develop its own language.