Online Film Screening
Sebastian Meise: Great Freedom
Goethe-Kino (Online - Only Available in the UK)
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Hans Hoffmann has been arrested for homosexual acts in a public toilet. The grainy super-8 images with which the film opens serve as proof. They were secretly filmed by the police. The year is 1968, but it is not the first time that Hans has been arrested on account of his homosexuality. After he had been a prisoner in a Nazis concentration camp, he again finds himself in prison immediately after the war in 1945. This is where he meets Victor for the first time, his cell mate, who has been convicted for murder. Though he initially rejects Hans, both men develop a deep relationship over the following decades, picking it up each time Hans has to return to prison, once in the 1950s and then againin 1968.
Awarded the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard Section at Cannes in 2021, Austrian director Sebastian Meise’s sombre but often tender and intimate drama returns to a dark chapter in (West-) German history, the legal persecution of homosexual men under “Section 175” (“Paragraph 175”). Introduced in 1871, broadened by the Nazis in 1935, and amended in West Germany in 1969 to allow men older than 21 to have relationships with other men, the paragraph was only abolished in 1994. In East Germany this that had already happened in 1968. But Meise’s film is not a legal drama. Focusing on the periods that Hans spends in prison, it centres on its two protagonists and their evolving relationship, which, partly due to the subtle and restrained performances by Franz Rogowski (Hans) and Georg Friedrich (Victor) is never clearly defined infusing the film with a sense of both loss and hope.
Austria / Germany 2021, colour, 116 mins. With English subtitles.
Directed by Sebastian Meise. With Franz Rogowski, Georg Friedrich, Anton von Lucke, Thomas Prenn
Sebastian Meise is an Austrian director and screenwriter. His acclaimed debut feature film Stillife premiered at San Sebastian IFF and won several awards, such as Best Feature Film at Diagonale Film Festival. His documentary film Outing was presented at the Hot Docs Festival in Toronto. His second feature film Great Freedom with the well known actors Franz Rogowski from Germany and Georg Friedrich from Austria in the leading roles had its world premiere in the Official Selection Un Certain Regard of the Cannes Film Festival in 2021 and was awarded the Prize of the Jury. He co-founded the Vienna based production company FreibeuterFilm. (Source: Match Factory)