Gay film prison
The power of Sebastian Meise’s subdued prison drama comes not from big, brash moments but from subtle details. Sound design that hints at the aching emptiness outside the frame and beyond the walls. A bruised light, which gives everything and everyone a half-dead pallor. And Franz Rogowski’s remarkable, contained performance as Hans Hoffman, a gay man who spends much of his life in prison, persecuted for his sexuality in accordance with paragraph of the German penal code.
Time ceases to have the same meaning behind bars, but thanks to a striking physical transformation, Rogowski guides us through a nonlinear storyline spanning – Hans is released from a concentration camp only to be imprisoned immediately for the crime of his homosexuality – to and the repeal of paragraph Hans’s incarcerations repeatedly reunite him with Viktor (Georg Friedrich), a one-time cellmate whose initial hostility evolves into something deeper. A remarkable closing shot can be read two ways: a spirit so broken that freedom is no longer an option, or a bold, dangerous statement of love?
Review: Franz Rogowski Puts The Great In The Gay Prison Drama 'Great Freedom'
The serial number tattoos that many Holocaust survivors bear on their arms own become such an indelible and sacred image of that horror and its lasting legacy that the thought of blasting that remembrance off of one&#;s body comes to one today, looking back, as an immediate shock. History, we are told, should not be forgotten&#;especially one as monumental as that. And so when that precise thing happens as an act of fraternal bonding between two prison inmates in Sebastian Meise&#;s intimate masterpiece Great Freedom it took me aback. And yet the film by its end makes such rich sense of it. Because what if history refuses to allow you go? What if you&#;re trapped inside the cogs of history-making by virtue of your self, of simply being, despite the shifting of seasons and the changing of the guards? What reminders do you need if there&#;s no forgetting in the first place?
When Viktor (Georg Friedrich) first notices the tell-tale numbers on the forearm of his new prison roommate Hans (Franz Rogowski,
Great Freedom review – forceful gay prison drama set in postwar Germany
The authority of Sebastian Meise’s subdued prison drama comes not from big, brash moments but from subtle details. Sound design that hints at the aching emptiness outside the frame and beyond the walls. A bruised light, which gives everything and everyone a half-dead pallor. And Franz Rogowski’s remarkable, contained performance as Hans Hoffman, a gay man who spends much of his life in prison, persecuted for his sexuality in accordance with paragraph of the German penal code.
Time ceases to have the alike meaning behind bars, but thanks to a impressive physical transformation, Rogowski guides us through a nonlinear storyline spanning – Hans is released from a concentration camp only to be imprisoned immediately for the crime of his homosexuality – to and the repeal of paragraph Hans’s incarcerations repeatedly reunite him with Viktor (Georg Friedrich), a one-time cellmate whose initial hostility evolves into something deeper. A remarkable closing shot can be read two ways: a spirit so broken that freedom is no
This Post-war Prison Drama Isn’t a “Gay Movie”, It’s a Love Story
Design & LivingFilm in Focus
Great Noun is “about longing for someone, about a society that doesn’t allow this to be, and the consequences that one has to take,” says guide actor Franz Rogowski
TextZoe Whitfield
“I am always scared of wasting time,” says Franz Rogowski from his noun in Berlin, two days into a lockdown sentence determined by a positive Covid test, “and moment doesn’t care.” As Hans Hoffman, the protagonist in Sebastian Meise’s second feature film, the prize-winning Great Freedom (it picked up a Jury Prize at Cannes last year), Rogowski is similarly at the mercy of time’s passing, albeit under a wholly different set of circumstances.
Set in post-war Germany, Hans is a gay bloke living in a particularly awful era of Paragraph , a piece of homophobic legislation first employed in and not fully eradicated until Under its terms, which among other things criminalised sex between men, he is repeatedly incarcerated; when we first meet him it’s , but the extent of his familiarity with