German director Christian Petzold made his reputation by finding inventive ways of revisiting his country’s difficult, thorny past. Nina Hoss, who won the Golden Space Needle Award at this year’s SIFF, has followed suit by taking on a series of challenging, Petzold-penned roles (six altogether).
In Phoenix, his Hitchcockian adaptation of Hubert Monteilhet’s 1961 novel, Hoss plays Nelly, a Holocaust survivor who emerges a new woman as the result of plastic surgery to reconstruct her injured face. Though her family is gone, she wants everything else to be as it was. Her primary obstacle: her gentile husband, Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld from Petzold’s excellent Barbara)…