ROSE World Cinema

Screening to be followed by a conversation with director and screenwriter Markus Schleinzer.

Academy Award®–nominee Sandra Hüller (ANATOMY OF A FALL) delivers another showstopping performance in Austrian filmmaker Markus Schleinzer’s (MICHAEL, AFI FEST 2011) captivating third feature, a transfixing, strikingly original folk tale about a woman who poses as a male soldier in 17th-century Germany. In the uneasy aftermath of Central Europe’s Thirty Years’ War, a battle-weary veteran sporting a distinctive facial scar (Hüller) arrives in a remote Protestant village claiming the inheritance of an abandoned farmstead. At first treated with extreme suspicion by the insular community, the outsider gradually wins their confidence through hard work, quiet resolve and surprising courage. No one suspects the truth that he is, in fact, a woman named Rose. When she is betrothed to a neighbor’s daughter (Caro Braun) and a surprising pregnancy ensues, Rose’s identity — one carefully constructed for survival — comes under increasing scrutiny, exposing the fragile boundaries between social acceptance and exclusion, freedom and oppression. Drawing on historical accounts of women who adopted male identities in early modern Europe, Schleinzer crafts a richly atmospheric tale, blending starkly tragic details with moments of dry, offbeat humor that punctuate the film’s darker currents, revealing the absurdities of the system within which Rose exists, even as her situation grows increasingly precarious. Shot in spectacular black and white by regular Schleinzer collaborator Gerald Kerkletz, the film’s austere visual beauty is matched only by Hüller’s exceptional performance, which earned a Silver Bear at the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival, and expertly captures both the resilience and vulnerability of a person determined to live — or die — beyond the limits imposed by society. A deeply humanist and compassionate work, ROSE is a timeless and resonant meditation on gender, power and identity, which illuminates the universal longing for self-determination as a freedom so often denied to those living outside of society’s dominant power structures. –Abbie Algar