General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Great Freedom

Great Freedom (German: Große Freiheit) is a 2021 prison drama directed by the Austrian filmmaker Sebastian Meise, in which a gay man named Hans Hoffmann is repeatedly imprisoned in post-war West Germany under Paragraph 175, the provision of the German Criminal Code that outlawed male homosexuality, and forms a lasting bond with his cellmate Viktor, a convicted murderer serving a life sentence.¹^•² The film won the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2021 Cannes Film Festival and was chosen as Austria's entry for the Best International Feature Oscar.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Director and writers	Sebastian Meise, co-written with Thomas Reider; Meise's second feature after Still Life (2011)²
Lead cast	Franz Rogowski as Hans Hoffmann; Georg Friedrich as Viktor; with Anton von Lucke and Thomas Prenn⁵
Story structure	Three intertwining timelines set in 1945, 1957, and 1968/69⁶
Historical basis	Real cases of gay men liberated from concentration camps by the Allies and taken straight to prison to serve remaining sentences under Paragraph 175⁶
Cannes 2021	Jury Prize, Un Certain Regard; jury under president Andrea Arnold; also nominated for the Queer Palm³^•⁷
Production	Austria/Germany, 116 minutes, German language; produced by FreibeuterFilm and Rohfilm; distributed by MUBI in multiple territories²^•⁸
Reception	97% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 62 reviews; US gross $68.6K¹

Spoilers

Story and structure

The film opens in West Germany soon after the Second World War and follows Hans across three decades in and out of jail for violating Paragraph 175, which outlawed the "unnatural sex act committed between persons of the male sex".² In the opening episode, set in 1968, Hans is jailed because he was filmed secretly having sex with other men; flashbacks to 1945 and 1957 reveal the continuity of the persecution he has endured.⁹

The emotional center is the relationship between Hans and his cellmate Viktor. Initial aversion gives way to tender intimacy as Hans tries to practice gay love even inside prison, to the extent the system's blind spots allow.⁹ Hans also finds a succession of temporary lovers behind bars during his repeated spells of detention.²

Meise has described the film as sitting between genres, a prison drama and a love story at once. He cited Escape from Alcatraz, Jean Genet's Un Chant d'Amour, Kiss of the Spider Woman, and A Prophet as points of reference while writing.⁸ An earlier draft of the screenplay followed chronological order and showed Hans's life outside prison, including his apartment, his work, and failed relationships; the non-chronological structure came later in the writing process.¹⁰

Historical background

The starting point for the screenplay was a series of documented real cases in which gay men liberated from concentration camps by the Allies were taken directly to German prisons to serve the remainder of their sentences under Paragraph 175, because homosexuality remained a crime for decades after the war.⁶ Meise and Reider researched the legal history and interviewed contemporary witnesses in Vienna and Berlin, men who had been imprisoned for their homosexuality in the 1960s and reported very similar experiences.⁶^•¹¹

Paragraph 175 came into force in Germany at the end of the 19th century, with a history reaching back to the early Middle Ages. The Nazis made the law harsher in 1935, and this harsher version was retained in the post-war period; the government modified it under pressure from the reform movement at the end of the 1960s.⁶ One festival synopsis dates the provision's ban on male homosexuality from 1871 to 1969.¹² In an interview, Meise stated that the paragraph was only abolished in 1994 in Germany and Austria.⁸ The Independent Cinema Office credits the historical injustice the film reflects on with more than 140,000 men imprisoned.¹²

The Austrian parallel law shows the same continuity. Paragraph 129 Ib of the Austrian Penal Code, introduced in 1852, criminalized sexual contact between men and between women as a "sexual offense against nature" until the 1971 small criminal law reform; after the 1938 Anschluss it remained in force even though the corresponding German Reich provision punished only male homosexuality.¹³ Post-war Austrian prosecution was intense: judicial convictions peaked in 1955, and one scholarly account counts over 13,000 convictions between 1945 and the 1971 liberalization, with multi-year prison sentences standard.¹⁴^•¹⁵ Even after 1971, successor provisions kept aspects of same-sex conduct criminal in Austria until 2002.¹⁶ Austria did not recognize gay people as a Nazi victim group for decades, granting financial reparation of about 5,000 euros in 1995 and including them in the Victims Compensation Act only in 2005.¹³ In June 2021 the Austrian Justice Minister Alma Zadić issued a historical apology for the criminal prosecution of homosexual men and women in the Second Republic, the same year the film premiered.¹⁶

Production

Meise wrote the part of Hans with Franz Rogowski in mind before knowing him personally, and the part was written without knowing whether Rogowski would accept it.⁸ Rogowski lost weight for the role for two reasons: Hans arrives in prison directly from a concentration camp, and the story spans 25 years, so a real physical change supported the make-up and aging work across the timelines.⁸ To achieve this, the film was shot chronologically backwards, starting in the 1960s and moving toward 1945.⁸

Locations and interruption. After scouting found twelve empty prisons in eastern Germany, Meise chose to shoot mostly on site at a disused prison in Magdeburg rather than rebuild cells in a studio, valuing a connection to reality.⁸^•¹⁷ The Covid-19 pandemic halted production with about 70 percent shot and two weeks of work remaining. During the four-month break Meise began editing and improved the cut; Rogowski described returning to set as feeling like coming home.⁸ Rogowski prepared for his workshop scenes by taking two sewing machines home to learn the craft.⁸

The crew included cinematographer Crystel Fournier, editor Joana Scrinzi, and composer Atanas Tcholakov, with producers Benny Drechsel, Sabine Moser, and Oliver Neumann.⁵

Release and reception

Great Freedom premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, where it was one of 20 films in the refocused Un Certain Regard lineup and won the Jury Prize from the jury led by Andrea Arnold.³ During the festival, MUBI acquired distribution rights for multiple territories including the UK and US, and the film was subsequently selected as Austria's contender for the Oscars.⁸ It received a limited US theatrical release on March 4, 2022, and began streaming on May 6, 2022.¹

Critics grouped around the film's restraint and its pairing of the political with the personal. The Hollywood Reporter's Cannes review called it a contemplative psychological study of the effects of incarceration and an unconventional love story, built on Rogowski's restrained performance.¹⁸ Screen's review described it as smoldering with indignation at a long-perpetrated injustice while remaining a love story and a character study of what long-term imprisonment for a crime that is not a crime does to the soul.¹⁹ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 97% Tomatometer from 62 reviews, with a critics consensus praising its intelligence and sensitivity.¹

Awards beyond Cannes. The film accumulated a long festival run through 2021 and 2022. Rogowski received a European Film Award nomination for best actor for the role, and the film collected acting prizes for him at Valenciennes, Waterloo, Sevilla, and Torino, festival awards including the Golden Giraldillo at Sevilla, the Gold Q-Hugo at Chicago, and the Golden Pram at Zagreb, and Austrian Diagonale awards for screenplay, editing, cinematography, acting, and production.²⁰^•⁸

What the film changed

Meise has said he did not know how long the prohibition of homosexuality had lasted until he began researching, and that the discovery that men could be liberated from camps and returned to prison drove the project.⁴ The film has since been used in Austrian educational contexts: a 2023 teaching resource on the Nazi persecution of homosexuals lists Große Freiheit as a work addressing the continuity of repression after 1945 in the West German context, and Erinnern.at made the persecution of homosexuals under National Socialism its theme for 2023.²¹ Meise noted that homosexuality remained illegal in about a third of the world's countries at the time of the film's release, in some cases punishable by long prison sentences or death.⁶

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2020 to 2022

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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