Foreign films are awfully helpful to a missionary: they help with language acquisition, let you observe people from another culture interacting under a variety of circumstances (without the stress of having to participate yourself), and – perhaps most importantly – offer a better sense of what kinds of characters and stories resonate with the culture.

Germany’s relatively recent history has been fertile ground for its filmmakers in the present century; 2006’s outstanding The Lives of Others dissected the human toll of the East German surveillance state in the waning years of the regime, while the sweetly funny Good Bye Lenin! (2003) walks with an East German family through the surreal, traumatic experience of their country’s collapse and reunification with its long-estranged Western sister.

Anna’s and my most recent viewing, Christian Petzold’s Barbara (2012; available on Netflix Instant), is an outstanding contribution to this cinematic retrospective. Set in 1980 (a decade before reunification) in an anonymous little East German town, it follows the title character – a doctor exiled from a prominent post in Berlin for seeking to leave the country – as she plots with her West German lover to defect and start a new life. A severe career downgrade, coupled with constant surveillance and regular searches of her home and person by the Stasi, have left her bitter and closed off from neighbors and colleagues. Nina Hoss’s marvelous performance sells but never oversells Barbara’s aloofness; bits of emotion show chinks in her armor, and it’s especially clear from her bedside manner that her patients are her one source of joy in her present circumstances.

It’s a film that could easily have flattened its characters (Hoss is joined by Ronald Zehrfeld as her boss at the hospital and Rainer Bock as her thorn-in-the-flesh Stasi observer) into caricatures – the Rebel, the Collaborator, the Oppressor – or played up its fairly melodramatic plot for tearjerking purposes, but Petzold’s direction is carefully restrained and his characters carefully humanized (although Zehrfeld verges on too-dreamy-to-be-true once or twice).

Barbara is most centrally and beautifully a story about the realization that Barbara’s salvation isn’t a matter of living under the right government (or at least no longer under the wrong one), nor of being with the man she loves, but a matter of recovering her humanity and becoming who she is made to be – it reads well in context as a reflection on the East German movement toward political liberation, which, while successful, hasn’t been the panacea it was cracked up to be. On a human level, it’s a resonant story of personal growth that emphasizes the transformative power of mercy.

It’s a film well worth the time of anybody who appreciates a well-made drama, but especially for those who’d like an insight into life in the surveillance state from the perspective of relatively ordinary people, as well as those interested in how contemporary German storytellers use that historical reality to reflect on the human condition.

-Ben