… which I highly recommend.

Released in 2012, I missed Barbara during the recent and short cinema run, and only just caught it some months after its London screening.

I know little about German cinema – Run Lola Run was probably my most recent experience – and it was the storyline that intrigued me most about Barbara. A couple of years ago I read, and was very much taken by, Anna Funder’s book Stasiland. The setting of Barbara in 1980’s East Germany fuelled my interest in the hidden world of that era. I first visited Germany, and Berlin, shortly after the wall came down. It felt then like I had only experienced a fragment of the aftermath, with no perspective on what had gone before.

Barbara, directed by Christian Petzhold, tells the story of a female doctor (played by Nina Hoss) in East Germany in 1980, who has been banished to a hospital in the provinces from Berlin as a result of her attempts to escape to the West. Barbara finds herself in a world where she does not know who she can trust, or love, including herself.

This is not a hugely action-packed film but a deeply compassionate and redemptive one. Watching it, for me, was a restorative experience.

CQ