‘Afire’ Trailer: Christian Petzold Lightens Up and Kindles a Romance with Paula Beer

Christian Petzold finds himself somewhere between the lands of late Éric Rohmer and vintage Noah Baumbach with his new romantic drama, “Afire.”

The German director of serious war-historical films like “Transit” and “Phoenix,” which bent time both in terms of their cinematic references and their manipulations of stylistic anachronisms, gets less serious with this film about four people vacationing, swapping beds, and surrounded by forest fires. Sideshow and Janus Films release “Afire” this summer on July 14 — it’s a perfectly lovely, summer kind of thing despite its tragic underpinnings. Watch the trailer for “Afire” below.

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Petzold conceived of “Afire” during the pandemic — though he shot afterward on-location in Germany — after feeling weary of bad news and so postponing another darker project for this deceptively lighter one instead. The film centers on a seaside vacation, when longtime best friends Leon (Thomas Schubert), a pretentious fiction writer struggling to crank out his new book, and Felix (Langston Uibel) show up at Felix’s family’s holiday home to discover Nadja (Paula Beer), a mysterious woman, already staying there. Meanwhile, an ever-encroaching forest fire threatens their well-being, testing relationships and kindling romances. “Afire” won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the 2023 Berlin Film Festival, where Petzold has regularly premiered his work.

With Petzold no longer working with his regular collaborator Nina Hoss — as of last fall, the pair remain on creative hiatus — Paula Beer is now Petzold’s company player. She previously starred in “Transit” and his 2020 pandemic-released “Undine,” a lyrical spin on the mermaid myth, with both films also starring Franz Rogowski.

From IndieWire’s review of “Afire”: “This smoldering tour through the life of the mind marks an endearing change of pace for the talented filmmaker, who trades the capital-H history of ‘Phoenix’ and romantic fantasy of ‘Undine’ for a more subdued — and sometimes surprisingly funny — character study.”

Look out for “Afire” in theaters on July 14. While the backing of Janus Films implies an eventual Criterion Channel release, Petzold has always made his films expressly for cinemas, telling IndieWire during the pandemic, “For me, looking at big flat screens at home is like him at the bar, very lonely as he recreates the cinema at home on the big screen with a big sound system. It’s not. Cinema is a social place like a bar, a common place where people buy a ticket sitting beside you in darkness who you have never seen before. We are lonely, but we are not alone in our loneliness. This is a fantastic place. This is my big screen.”

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