Great Freedom is “about longing for someone, about a society that doesn’t allow this to be,” says lead actor Franz Rogowski
from his home in Berlin, two days into a lockdown sentence determined by a positive Covid test, “and time doesn’t care.” As Hans Hoffman, the protagonist in Sebastian Meise’s second feature film, the prize-winning, 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 man living in a particularly awful era of Paragraph 175, a piece of homophobic legislation first employed in 1871 and not fully eradicated until 1994. Under its terms, which among other things criminalised sex between men, he is repeatedly incarcerated; when we first meet him it’s 1968, but the extent of his familiarity with the law unfolds over three decades.
Working with Meise was a collaborative experience, he says, which began with the pair gaining trust over drinks. “The most important thing for us, in the beginning, was that we could share some time in a bar and look in each other’s eyes,” he explains. “That led to extremes of me talking about the camera and maybe changing the lens, to him guiding me through, crafting scenes from scratch.
Growing up in Germany in the late 80s and early 90s, Rogowski was himself privy to a culture informed by Paragraph 175, though only since working on the project has he consciously understood what that means. “Your parents’ reaction towards homosexuality or society’s reactions towards being soft as a man, really had to do with the fact it was actually illegal to be gay – it was dangerous, a crime.
The feature is ambiguously titled – though Meise offers one interpretation, naming the gay bar Hans visits in the film’s final act, ‘Great Freedom’ – and for Rogowski that offered the space to scrutinise his on-set environment, in a former prison near Magdeburg. “It meant a lot [to be filming in a real prison].
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