Our discussion of the Berlin School is about to take a significant turn as we now explore the group's second wave of filmmakers—directors, as I suggested in the introduction, whose subsumption under the label “Berlin School” is more problematic than that of their somewhat older first-wave peers. Arslan, Petzold, and Schanelec all attended the dffb in the early 1990s, were influenced by the same group of teachers, and even occasionally collaborated on each other's student short films. In contrast, the second-wave Berlin School filmmakers generally did not share such a cohesive institutional background. Moreover, the relationships they eventually developed with each other and with the first wave emerged only after they graduated from the various film academies they attended in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It is therefore especially interesting to note that the more widespread discursive engagement with the group as a whole did not really begin until some of these second-wave filmmakers released their debut features.