Barbara
2012
***½
Director: Christian Petzold
Cast: Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld, Jasna Fritzi Bauer, Mark Waschke, Rainer Bock, Christina Hecke, Claudia Geisler
Some time in the 1980s, a doctor from East Berlin is transferred to a small rural hospital and placed under close Stasi surveillance. She plots a swift defection to the West, but her ambiguous colleague and her patients make her question her priorities. Christian Petzold and Nina Hoss return to the German Baltic coast in their follow-up to Jerichow. This is a much better film, although the large shadow of The Lives of Others looms over the entire storyline. Nevertheless, this stylish and slow-burning drama reminds us that there was no private life in the totalitarian GDR.
