Ghosts (Gespenster) [2005]

 Christian Petzold delivered haunting inquiries into the questions of individual and collective identity in reunified Germany, and underlying unresolved political and social fault-lines, in his remarkable ‘Ghosts Trilogy’. The trilogy delved into that through estranged outsiders who were left in the margins during this assimilation exercise. Ghosts, the trilogy’s moving central chapter – and much more loosely-strung vis-à-vis the two films it’s bookended by, viz. The State I Am In and Yella – had a particularly spectral and disenfranchised protagonist in Nina (Julia Hummer), an orphaned, alienated and pathologically shy teenaged girl whose job as a trash collector and stay at a public home are contingent on her ability to fit in. The isolated life of this intensely lost and lonely girl is briefly upended by two dramatic encounters. On one hand she befriends Toni (Sabine Timoteo) – a slightly older brash, impetuous and rebellious girl who snatches what she needs and lives outside the law – upon accidentally witnessing a violent attack on her by a couple of guys; they form a tender relationship as Toni temporarily takes Nina under her wings, while Nina becomes profoundly entranced by Toni. Meanwhile, Françoise (Marianne Basler), a beautiful, upper-class and grief-stricken middle-aged woman – who’s just been released from a mental hospital, as she’s been struggling with the trauma of losing her daughter who’d been stolen as a toddler many years back – starts aimlessly wandering across Berlin while her husband is tied up in business matters, and is convinced that Nina is her long-lost daughter upon bumping into her. Hummer and Timoteo were superb in revealing their emotional vulnerabilities and scars as social misfits in this bleak and melancholic tale co-written by the great Harun Farocki.

Director: Christian Petzold

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama

Language: German

Country: Germany