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Ghosts in the city

Christian Petzold's psychological thriller Yella sometimes seems as though it's wandering through a surreal no man's land. Divorcee Yella moves from East to West Germany to start a new life, navigating an array of spotless hotel rooms, eerily empty business centres and sparsely decorated offices in sparsely populated cities. The film could easily be a chronicle of the geography of 'non-places', the term coined by French anthropologist Marc Auge for spaces devoid of history and human relationships.

'I think the whole of Germany looks like that,' says Petzold from Berlin, where he and his wife, filmmaker Aysun Bademsoy, live. The 47-year-old - who has spent the past decade making films that portray his country as a land of rootless, alienated individuals struggling to connect with even the closest of kin - says Germany's rapid post-war ascent towards becoming an economic powerhouse has obliterated the country's original social fabric. 'In old times, the clock in a town was on the tower of the church,' he says. 'After the second world war, the clocks are on the towers of the factories. You can see this clock in Wolfsburg, in Leverkusen with [pharmaceutical giant] Bayer, in Mannheim with [another pharmaceutical giant] BASF, and Wittenberge on the tower of [former East German sewing machine manufacturer] Veritas.

'The centre of the city in Germany was not like Berlin in the 1920s: there's no oak-lined boulevards, cinemas - it's just factories that were the centres.'

But Petzold's films deal with a grimmer reality when the factories no longer serve as the bastions of economic and social dynamism. Their replacements? Nondescript boardrooms where intangible wealth is secured or lost on paper, as markets are manipulated and companies teetering on financial collapse are reduced to their bare bones. This change is embodied best in Yella's journey; she leaves behind her ex-husband - also her partner in a failed business venture - and a city emptied of economic potential to a supposedly brighter future in Hanover. An accountant, she accidentally meets Philipp, who makes his living buying and reselling assets of businesses nearing bankruptcy. Casting aside a past of small sums and even smaller prospects, Yella delves headlong into the world of venture capitalism, where fortunes are made (or whittled away) not through manual labour but convoluted exchanges of business jargon and negotiations which are nothing but exercises of brinksmanship.

A graduate in German and theatre studies, Petzold admits he knew nothing of the world of private equity and entrepreneurs until his involvement two years ago in Nothing Ventured, a documentary about the work of venture capitalists in Germany by his long-time collaborator Harun Farocki.

'I saw for the first time in my life the world of modern capitalism, like an ethnographic film and not like by someone who hasn't read a single page of the [Wall Street] Economic Journal,' says Petzold.

'He shows the three or four days of meetings for a private equity [investor], and for the first time I saw a new language, new looks, new bodies, new men - like a Shakespearean drama in a modern world.'

Petzold merged what he learnt on Nothing Ventured with an idea he had six years ago when he first arrived on the banks of the Elbe to make Something to Remind Me (which also features Yella's main star, Nina Hoss, in a leading role). 'There was this town called Wittenberge and it was filled up with men,' he says. 'Women have left the town because of the economic thing. There were no jobs any more and we thought about where the women had gone to - what are they searching for and what's their story and history?'

Farocki's documentary provided the background for his character to reinvent herself as she 'goes into a modern world', Petzold says. 'She wants to get rich but it's not in the 1920s, there are no fat capitalists with cigars - [the new elite] are modern, smart newcomers who are 25, 30 or 35. They are a little bit sexy and the language is sexy - they want to 'break down' bureaucracy and have a 'slim', 'flexible' state.'

This explains why Yella moves in a genteel world of impeccably dressed businessmen driving expensive saloon cars, travelling among refined offices through the country's efficient network of autobahns. This is where the ephemerality comes in, however: in Yella - as in most of Petzold's previous work - the world is shorn of emotions and sharp colours.

Yella is the final part of Petzold's so-called Trilogy of Ghosts - the other two are The State I Am In (about a pair of former terrorists and their young daughter living a nomadic life across Portugal and Germany, with the police in pursuit) and Ghosts (about a mentally unstable French woman fantasising about finding her long-abducted daughter, a teenage tearaway, and the girl's manipulative, older friend). Petzold says his characters in these three films are all 'ghosts' with nothing concrete to relate them to the society they should have been part of. 'These parents living in a car, going through German highways, have no connections with friends or history anymore - nobody sees them, nobody meets them,' he says, referring to how the family in The State I Am In are either shunned or betrayed by former comrades or current confidantes.

'I remember this German legend that there are so many ghosts in the streets who are in between life and the afterlife, who are not dead but not alive any more,' he says. 'This is a tradition which is very rich to think about - workers with unions that nobody wants any more, are they ghosts?' The same goes for the supposedly brand-new cityscapes he shows in his films, such as the sprawling new architecture in Berlin that provides the backdrop for the juvenile delinquents in Ghosts. 'They always show photos and movie sequences from the 1920s of Potsdamer Platz, that place in Europe with the greatest traffic, bars and clubs. Now they've rebuilt the centre and the signs of the 1920s, but people who are between the signs and houses are like ghosts.'

What makes Petzold one of the leading lights in his generation of filmmakers is his deftness at providing political commentary without resorting to slogans or hackneyed cliches. With its multi-layered story, Yella is more a thriller than a political film. It's hardly surprising, then, that a teenage Petzold was not inspired by the political work of the German New Wave, but Alfred Hitchcock's scary movies. 'I saw 45 Hitchcock movies when I was 16 during a retrospective in town,' Petzold says. 'After that, I started to see films by Wim Wenders and films from the 1970s.'

After leaving Berlin's Free University with his first degree, he moved to the German Film and Television Academy for further studies, graduating in 1994. Having worked as an assistant director for more established filmmakers and in television, Petzold's first full-length feature film was 2000's The State I Am In, a critical and commercial success that brought him several nominations at the German Film Awards.

His subsequent films have all been well received, including Something to Remind Me (a movie which won Petzold prizes at the German Television Awards) and then Wolfsburg, about the fear and fury spawned by a hit-and-run case. The latter consolidated his position at the forefront of new German cinema and as a major player in the so-called Berlin School, a group of young 1990s filmmakers emerging from that city. But it was Ghosts that put Petzold on the map, with the film selected for competition at the Berlin International Film Festival. Two years later Yella eclipsed that, with Hoss winning best actress and editor Bettina Bohler winning the Femina Film Prize (which honours achievement by women filmmakers) and Petzold again placed in the running for the Golden Bear award.

Petzold says he could have stayed in television a decade ago - 'It's much more flexible, you just need two guys and you can go anywhere,' he says - but film 'sees more than television'.

'Cinema is very, very heavy and slower [in production] than television, but sees things which you can't find formula for, but you can feel for.' Which is all very well, given the feeling-less world that he strives to portray in the films he makes.

Yella is screened on Oct 21 at 9.35pm at AMC Festival Walk as part of Max!, Goethe-Institut Hong Kong's annual festival of German films. Go to www.goethe.de/max

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