''Great Freedom'' (german: Große Freiheit) is a 2021

drama Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance: a play, opera, mime, ballet, etc., performed in a theatre, or on radio or television.Elam (1980, 98). Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the dramatic mode has been ...

film directed by . In June 2021, the film was selected to compete in the ''

Un Certain Regard (, meaning 'a certain glance') is a section of the Cannes Film Festival's official selection. It is run at the Debussy, parallel to the competition for the . This section was introduced in 1978 by Gilles Jacob. The section presents 20 films w ...

'' section at the

2021 Cannes Film Festival The 74th annual Cannes Film Festival took place from 6 to 17 July 2021, after having been originally scheduled from 11 to 22 May 2021. American director Spike Lee was invited to be the head of the jury for the festival for a second time, after t ...

. At Cannes, the film won the Jury Prize in the ''Un Certain Regard'' section. It won the Golden Giraldillo at the

Seville European Film Festival The Seville European Film Festival (SEFF; es, Festival de Cine Europeo de Sevilla, links=no) is an annual film festival dedicated to European cinema held in November in Seville, Spain, since 2004. The festival is an initiative of the Instituto d ...

. It was selected as the Austrian entry for the Best International Feature Film at the

94th Academy Awards The 94th Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), took place on March 27, 2022, at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles, Hollywood, Los Angeles. The awards were scheduled after its u ...

, and on 22 December 2021, it was shortlisted for the award ceremony. The film was released theatrically on 18 November 2021 in Germany by Piffl Medien and the following day in Austria by Filmladen Filmverleih.

Plot

In post-

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

Germany, Hans is imprisoned for being gay and develops a relationship with his cellmate Viktor, a convicted murderer.

Cast

Franz Rogowski Franz Rogowski (; born 2 February 1986) is a German actor and dancer. He has appeared in films directed by Michael Haneke, Christian Petzold and Terrence Malick. Life and career Franz Rogowski was born in 1986 in Freiburg im Breisgau, West Germ ...

as Hans Hoffmann * Georg Friedrich as Viktor Kohl * as Leo * as Oskar

Reception

Critical reception

On the

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website

Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...

, the film holds an approval rating of 97% based on 60 reviews from critics, with an average rating of 8.1/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "With intelligence and sensitivity, ''Great Freedom'' draws on past injustices to present a beautifully crafted tribute to the persistence of the human spirit" On

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...

, the film has a weighted average score of 89 out of 100, based on 18 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".

Awards and nominations

References

External links

* 2021 films 2021 drama films 2021 LGBT-related films 2020s German-language films Austrian drama films Austrian LGBT-related films Films set in the 1940s Films set in the 1950s Films set in the 1960s Films set in prison Gay-related films German drama films German LGBT-related films LGBT-related drama films 2020s German films Films set in West Germany {{2020s-Germany-film-stub