German director Christian Petzold’s movie Barbara is one of the most paranoid
films of recent years. Not in a lunatic, they’re all out to get me way, but in
the very real way that political dissidents lived in East Germany during the
Cold War. This particular study, which could easily be considered a sister film
of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s brilliant The Lives of Others, concerns a female physician forced to give up
her prominent post at a hospital in Berlin for a life at a pediatric hospital
in the countryside. I’m not sure the reasons for her exile are made explicit in
the film, but Wikipedia (not necessarily renowned for its accuracy) says it was
because she applied for a visa to leave for the West.
