Christian Petzold on his creative partnership with the late Harun Farocki and tackling a topic he did not know much about with YELLA, which we are screening on March 5:
"
Modern capitalism, there has to be something sexy about it. Years ago, racketeers hid themselves away in a temple. Like thieves, they were ugly, devious, conniving. These days they are breezy, charming, healthy, Buddhist. But we still portray this world in old pictures, caricatures. We don’t have a picture of it, no story. These
new pictures and new stories, that was what YELLA was about for me.
I’m not familiar with this world of business negotations. I can only guess what it’s like and
I didn’t want to build on hunches. People often base this world on something that they already know. So I watched Harun Farocki’s 2004 documentary film NOTHING VENTURED. In his film,
he observes, he doesn’t comment.
All the scenes, all the negotiations in YELLA are inspired by material that Harun, who I’ve been writing with for more than 10 years, had already researched and filmed. In every one of those negotiations, there is suspense and humour, intrigue and strategies.
In one of the negotiations, after three days of argument, one of the negotiators says that the result was actually already a foregone conclusion -- that they are actually only meeting because it’s fun, because it’s the culture."
Writer-director Christian Petzold is one of the leading directors of New German Cinema, or the so-called Berlin School. He received the Silver Bear for Best Director in 2012 for BARBARA, which became an Oscar contender, and the Grimme Award for DREILEBEN in the same year. His latest success came with his TIFF14 world premiere of PHOENIX, again with recurring lead actress Nina Hoss. He was twice named Best Director at the German Film Awards, for the psychological drama WOLFSBURG and THE STATE I AM IN. GHOSTS, YELLA and JERICHOW earned him three German Film Critics Awards.
Born in 1960, Petzold studied German and Theatre at the Free University in Berlin, then graduated from the German Film & Television Academy Berlin (DFFB) in 1994.
image: c Hans Fromm
