08/08/2014 - Christian Petzold's new film has been selected in competition at the 62nd San Sebastian IFF (September 19-27)

Christian Petzold's Phoenix [+see also:
film review
trailer
making of
interview: Christian Petzold
film profile], produced by Schramm Film Koerner & Weber, will have its European premiere in competition at the San Sebastian IFF after its world premiere in Toronto. As his previous film, the internationally-acclaimed Barbara [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Christian Petzold
film profile], Phoenix features Nina Hoss and Ronald Zehrfeld. Nina Hoss' character, Nelly Lenz, is an Auschwitz survivor who has been disfigured while in the concentration camp. After a surgical intervention, she starts looking for her husband Johnny, who is convinced that she is dead. When Nelly finally finds him, he does not recognise her, but finds an unsettling similarity between her and the wife he remembers, and therefore asks that she pretends to be her so he can claim the inheritance which was left behind by Nelly's family after they were murdered in the Holocaust. Nelly agrees and becomes her own doppelgänger. What she wants to know is if Johnny ever loved her, or if he betrayed her. What she wants is to have her life back.

The competition also includes Austria's Michael Sturminger's Casanova Variations [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], coproduced by X Filme Creative Pool and starring the German actress Veronika Ferres.

Limbo, by the DffB graduate Anna Sofie Hartmann and the German coproduction Modris, by Juris Kursietis (coproduced by Sutor Kolonko) have been selected in the New Directors Competition. They are vying for the Kutxa New Directors Award (worth € 50,000). Limbo, set in a small Danish town, focuses on the relationship between a teenager and her new teacher.

The rest of the programme of the Spanish festival will be announced at the end of August.