I wasn’t aware of GREAT FREEDOM (Sebastian Meise, 2021), surprising because it’s the kind of film I look out for: the subject matter, the stars, the Jury Prize at Cannes… After the end of the war, Hans, a gay man who’d been sent to a concentration camp under Paragraph 175, gets shifted onto a normal prison. No Liberation for him. Viktor, a convicted killer is his roommate. The film is really about the unfolding of their relationship as Hans gets continually returned to prison for  being caught being gay; a ‘crime’ that shouldn’t be and which he can’t help. Hans loses and finds different form of love inside and find the Great Freedom offered on the outside its own prison, sexually commodified and devoid of the feelings prison’s nurtured. There are very few films that explore the relationship, love really, between a gay and straight man, not without a sexual component but not driven by it, the way this one does. Babenco’s THE KISS OF THE SPIDERWOMAN is the only other that currently comes to mind; and I found it moving, though the ending was perhaps a bit binary and cliché-ish, a pity because before it Hans’s freedom, his gallantry and choice of love in the harshest of circumstances, is like that of a Genet character . GREAT FREEDOM is intimate, sensual, complex on the price of being and its many hierarchies, shifting with context; who can endure and for how long? Who can transform and overcome and how? Franz Rogowski and Georg Friedrich are both great in it. It’s on MUBI.

José Arroyo