Great Freedom · reception & legacy

2021 · Sebastian Meise

How Great Freedom has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

Acclaimed straight out of the gate — Jury Prize in Un Certain Regard at Cannes 2021, then Austria's Oscar entry that made the shortlist but missed the final five, a snub cinephiles still grumble about. It hasn't needed reappraisal; it went almost directly from festival darling to modern queer-canon fixture.

What's debated

The recurring gripe isn't about the film but around it: that it (and Franz Rogowski generally) keeps getting shortlisted, praised, and then passed over by the big awards bodies.

Its footprint

It's become a go-to reference point for Paragraph 175 — the fact reviewers can't stop citing is that the law criminalizing gay men stayed on German books until 1994. It's also a cornerstone of the Franz Rogowski cult, endlessly programmed alongside Transit and Passages, and one of MUBI's defining releases of its era.

Where it stands

A Letterboxd-beloved pillar of 2020s queer cinema — the 'if you love Rogowski, you must have seen this' film.

★ Did you know? The film began when co-writer Thomas Reider unearthed a fact Meise found almost unbelievable: gay men liberated from Nazi concentration camps by the Allies were transferred straight to prison to serve out sentences under Paragraph 175 — and the filmmakers interviewed survivors imprisoned under the law during their years of research.