13/03/2025 - The German director discusses European cinema, the representation of women, and his upcoming film, Miroirs No. 3, on which he has just wrapped post-production

(© Bergamo Film Meeting)

On the occasion of the retrospective dedicated to him in the Bergamo Film Meeting’s Europe, Now! section, German director Christian Petzold spent time with Cineuropa to discuss European cinema, the representation of women, and his upcoming film, Miroirs No. 3, on which he has just wrapped post-production.

Cineuropa: This festival which places such heavy focus on new European cinema is dedicating a whole section to you. What kind of audience have you found for your films?
Christian Petzold: Bergamo Film Meeting really is special. It’s not competitive, it doesn’t have a market, it seems content to just show films from the other side of the mountains to this valley. I’m happy to have brought my films here. I’ve found a curious audience who seem to have a good relationship with cinema.

Among many things in your most recent film, Afire [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Christian Petzold
film profile], I picked up on an “author’s crisis”. Is European film able to portray what’s going on right now in the world for audiences?
Yes, there’s an author’s crisis in the film, and the male subject’s crisis too, because there’s this character who writes books, who thinks he’s a genius and who’s surrounded by a gigantic ecological crisis which he’s not remotely aware of. I think this could also be representative of European cinema, which should open our eyes to what’s going on around us. I think European films are very interesting because they’re mostly films which have seen something. These directors don’t want to show us something, they want to offer up a little bit of themselves. A Spanish film by Carla Simón or a Danish one by Joachim Trier doesn’t have anything to do with Europe, it’s a story about Oslo and about a new type of modern woman with her own desires. These are European films. Co-productions involving three or four countries which want to tell us something about Europe don’t tend to do very well. This continent is special in many different ways, and we’re curious and interested in strange and diverse viewpoints. When I was 26 and studying at the academy, a teacher told us we had to make films which would help people understand how we kissed and how we danced 30 years later. A family eating dinner in a Spanish film is different from one set in Paris.

You’ve just finished Miroirs No. 3, which isn’t part of your “Elements Trilogy”, but which is toplined once again by Paula Beer, this time playing a young pianist who loses her boyfriend in a tragic accident. Should we prepare ourselves for some kind of thriller?
We finished post-production three days ago and, as he watched it, the producer told me that it’s actually a film about wind, so it automatically became the third movie in the trilogy. It’s not really a thriller. It’s the portrait of a family, and it’s actually a bit of a horror film because there are horror aspects to all families. There’s guilt, there are things that we hide, there are unsatiated desires. In this ensemble-style tragedy, there’s a girl who’s studying Maurice Ravel’s suite, as per the title, and who’s manipulated without her realising it. The film’s subheading is A Ship on the Ocean, an image used in Germany to indicate a crisis; in other words a sinking ship whose passengers are trying to survive. This film is all about constructing a life raft.

Female themes are at the heart of your films. We’re seeing increasing numbers of films with female protagonists but directed and written by men. What are your thoughts on this?
When I was on a jury in Venice a few years ago, I received a call telling me that I’d been awarded the Women in Cinema Award, and I thought it was a joke and that maybe someone from #metoo wanted to throw tomatoes at me or kill me! It was a prize for the way I depicted women in film. In that moment I remembered something that I can now give as a response to this question, something which happened to me when I was in Venice in 2000 with my first film [The State I Am In ndr]. I was on the hotel terrace eating breaking and next to me was Claude Chabrol, who I wanted to speak to, to tell him how his films had had an enormous influence on my career. He was giving an interview, and the journalist was asking him why he’d always painted incredible portraits of women in his films, starring brilliant actresses such as Stéphane Audran, Romy Schneider and Isabelle Huppert. His reply was one that I think I can adopt myself, which is that men in film live while women in films survive. And cinema itself is all about survival. It’s much harder for women, they’re often seen through a male gaze which assesses their physical appearance and erotic appeal. This fight to be independent and for their own identity, this fight for survival should be the object of films, even for male directors depicting women.

(Translated from Italian)