Harun Farocki

Christian Petzold displayed a rare gift for genre subversion from the very start. At once a coming-of-age tale and terrorists-on-the-run thriller, his debut feature uses the former to comment on the latter—its mutable young protagonist serving as a proxy for a nation surveying its traumatic past.

Christian Petzold’s last student short was a stylistic breakthrough for the young director. A film noir-inspired story of those left behind by Germany’s new neoliberal economy, The Warm Money operates in the genre-influenced mode of filmmaking that would make Petzold a star of arthouse cinema.