The film is set in a small town in the summer of 1980 where the young doctor from Berlin has been sent as a punishment after applying to leave East Germany and emigrate to the West. Barbara finds herself in a hospital where she works in the department of paediatric surgery and she is determined to remain emotionally distanced from here colleagues and her patients as she is already preparing herself psychologically for her departure. Her Western boyfriend Jorg is planning her escape from the GDR and Barbara is waiting for her new life to begin. She is surrounded by colleagues that might be also working for the Stasi and suspicious of anyone who approaches her even if she feels lonely and isolated.
But Barbara is a dedicated doctor and she soon finds it impossible not to relate to Stella, a young runaway who is one of her patients. She is also attracted to Andre a fellow doctor even though she is at the same time suspicious of him. This is an uptight, restrained world where Barbara has to build a protective shell around herself to survive.
Hoss gives a wonderfully controlled performance in this claustrophobic world of Petzold’s creation. Speaking at the press conference Hoss said that the challenge had been to strike the right mood or atmosphere of what it must have been like for a woman like Barbara to live in the GDR as she had never been there. She spent many hours speaking to the director about his experiences growing up there.
Petzold spent his childhood in East Germany which his parents fled when he was still a child and he said that he felt almost homesick for the old GDR when shooting the film.
The sets with their muted colours and aided by stationary shots from cinematographer Hans Fromm recreate the look and the atmosphere of the East Bloc in the 1980’s. Petzold said that he had not tried not so much to authentically recreate the GDR as to recreate the look or feel of it. “Often when you see the GDR depicted,” he said, “it looks mothballed on film. This isn’t a historical film.”
Most of all the film asks the question about what is freedom. What it really means to Barbara and how freedom is not absolute but depends on our interactions with and relationships to those around us.
Director: Christian Petzold
Cast: Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld, Rainer Bock, Christina Hecke
