Phoenix is a 2014 German melodrama war film directed by Christian Petzold. Loosely adapted from the 1961 novel Le Retour des Cendres (English: The Return from the Ashes) by French author Hubert Monteilhet, the film stars Nina Hoss and Ronald Zehrfeld as Nelly and Johnny Lenz, respectively. Phoenix is set in Germany in the aftermath of World War II, where Nelly, a Jewish woman who managed to survive Auschwitz concentration camp, decides to go back to her husband Johnny in Berlin. She has had to have her face reconstructed owing to a bullet wound, and her husband does not recognize her. The film marks the sixth collaboration between Petzold and Hoss, as well as being the second film in which Hoss and Zehrfeld star opposite each other, after Barbara (2012), also directed b
