<\/p>\n
Towards the end of the Thirty Years’ War, a soldier arrives in a remote Protestant village and announces that he is the heir to a long-abandoned farmstead \u2014 producing a document to convince the suspicious villagers. What nobody in the village knows is that the soldier is a woman who has lived as a man for years, having taken the name of a fellow soldier killed in the war. Rose’s one wish is to be a good citizen and a useful member of the community: she works the land, puts the farm back in order, and slowly earns the village’s respect. But the better she succeeds at fitting in, the more this world asks of her that she cannot give.<\/p>\n
The film does not come from the story of one individual. The screenplay starts out from the dozens of documented cases known from European history: women who passed as men in order to be soldiers, craftsmen or farmers. The question it unfolds from that material is not who Rose really was, but how much freedom a person is owed, and what price is demanded for it by the community they want to live in.<\/p>\n
The Austrian director Markus Schleinzer<\/strong> came to filmmaking by an unusual route: for sixteen years he worked as a casting director on more than seventy films, alongside Michael Haneke, Ulrich Seidl and Jessica Hausner \u2014 he cast and coached the child actors of The White Ribbon<\/em>. He made his directing debut in 2011 with Michael<\/em>, which went straight into competition at Cannes and won the Max Oph\u00fcls Prize; Angelo<\/em> followed in 2018, the story of Angelo Soliman, brought to Habsburg Vienna as an enslaved child. Rose<\/em> is his third feature, and it is no accident that all three treat the same thing through different material: people whom society places outside its own order.<\/p>\n Sandra H\u00fcller<\/strong> takes the lead, known from Anatomy of a Fall<\/em>, The Zone of Interest<\/em> and Toni Erdmann<\/em>. She won the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance at the Berlinale for this role. Caro Braun, Godehard Giese, Maria Dragus, Annalisa Hohl and Robert Gwisdek appear alongside her. Gerald Kerkletz was the cinematographer and Tara Nome Doyle composed the score, for which she won Best Film Score at the Diagonale in Graz. Shooting took place in the Harz mountains and Lower Austria, from the spring of 2024 to December.<\/p>\n The film premiered in the main competition of the 76th Berlin International Film Festival and has since worked through the year’s major festivals: it won top prizes in Hong Kong and Brussels, screenplay awards in Istanbul and at the Diagonale, and played Telluride, the New York Film Festival and the BFI London Film Festival. Austria selected it as its entry for the Best International Feature Film Oscar in 2027. The critical reception is unusually unanimous: on Rotten Tomatoes thirty-one of thirty-two reviews are positive, and Metacritic rates it “universal acclaim.”<\/p>\n <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Towards the end of the Thirty Years’ War, a soldier arrives in a remote Protestant village and announces that he is the heir to a long-abandoned farmstead \u2014 producing a document to convince the suspicious villagers. What nobody in the village knows is that the soldier is a woman who has lived as a man […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":35576,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n