Barbara, review - Telegraph Dir: Christian Petzold; starring: Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld, Jasna Fritzi Bauer, Mark Waschke, Christina Hecke In a layered, nuanced performance, Nina Hoss plays the eponymous East Berlin doctor whose application for an exit visa from the GDR sees her banished to a country hospital near the Baltic coast. Here, she strikes up a friendship with a pleasant if enigmatic colleague (Roland Zehrfeld) while formulating an escape plan with Jörg (Mark Waschke), her West German lover. 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.