In the depths of the German countryside in the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), a mysterious man—whose name we don’t know—appears to claim his farmland inheritance. This is the eponymous Rose (Sandra Hüller), who fought as a soldier in the Brabant as a man for many years. Now, she continues this guise, marries, and has a child with no intentions other than to simply live as she is. The villagers, however, are of a different mindset.
Rose, by Austrian multi-hyphenate Markus Schleinzer and written by himself and Alexander Brom, made an acclaimed world premiere earlier this year in competition for the Golden Bear at the 2026 Berlinale. It may very well be the start to a wondrous year of Hüller, who snagged the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance—her second, 20 years after her first—for her moving titular performance.
In the framework of IndieLisboa, where the film enjoyed its Portuguese premiere in the Rhizome section, we had the great opportunity to sit down with Schleinzer to discuss his most recent directorial effort.
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Purple Hour: Violence of all forms is omnipresent in this film, including sexual violence and capital punishment, yet it is hidden from the viewer. Could you speak about this choice and the decision to keep these elements offscreen?
Markus Schleinzer: I was teaching for 14 years, so I had to watch a lot of movies every day in my work. As a private person, as a filmgoer myself, and as a human in our society nowadays, I’m really fed up and disgusted with the way we treat violence in movies. Because I think that films and images have a huge responsibility. I guess there’s nothing more violent, nothing more aggressive, and nothing deeper than our own fantasies. If we are feeding our fantasies with even more images, we can get more cruel, more violent, more aggressive, and less empathic. I always promised myself all the images I create must be aware of the responsibility they carry. It’s not my thing to show violence. But not showing the consequences of violence is the most stupid thing, because that would mean to silence the victims, and we have done this as a society for such a long time.
I was 18 years old when, for the very first time in my life, I saw a dead human being on television. It was during the war in Yugoslavia, as it was at the time. I was shocked that I could see something like this. A certain kind of taboo has been broken, which maybe has some good parts too, I don’t know, but we are just flooded with images like this. I really have to say that we have to get back to the responsibility of storytelling, knowing that there’s nothing more violent than our fantasies.
Rose is very specific about how she describes gender, from pushing back against the villagers about ever “pretending” to be a man, to a later scene when she says she never intended to “be a man”. She simply wears trousers, and the community perceives her how they want to.
I thought that maybe Rose could be a new chapter in this cross-dressing genre. We deal with a woman in trousers, but we never have to expose her, because what for? We all know what kind of voyeurism and sexism we might give the audience when we show something like this. I did not only do my research on this historical part of women in trousers, but I also tried to see every single cross-dressing movie I could get. It was bizarre that men in dresses are always portrayed as funny. But women in trousers always have a particular scene where they have to undress them in front of the camera. Sometimes it does not even help the story. There was a lot of discussion about the male gaze, how we show sex, and how we treat women in film, in the very early stage of scriptwriting.
I came up with an idea of how to deal with the questions of showing sexuality, showing naked bodies. This has to do with responsibility. I have the feeling we are in the middle of a war about definitions: what is gender and who is allowed to speak about what. If we finally come up with the idea that gender is something that you can achieve, why did I have to prove it by showing body parts? I think that it works pretty well with Rose, that we never have to undress Sandra Hüller, and this is something that I could promise her at the beginning of the project. It was already written in the script that there will be no naked body parts, and that we will achieve telling the story without using this very simple trick.
I enjoy how the film refuses the audience certain answers, such as the so-called biological father of the baby, or how Rose could have gotten by for so many years as a soldier without anyone discovering her secret. As a filmmaker, how do you approach the tension between rationality and mystery?
Not telling who the fathers are, to me, has much to do with not giving perpetrators the stage. We have a huge problem in Austria with femicide. 99% of women who are killed in Austria are killed by their own by the husbands or partners. Living at home is the most dangerous spot for a woman. In Austria, we have a huge discussion ongoing about press and media, because most of the time, when we have to learn again and again that the woman has been killed, the headlines are first, “he stabbed her”, and then, “he cried”. Why do we give this stage of empathy to perpetrators? I really wanted to keep the story with the women. I didn’t want to give away the idea that maybe the father of Suzanna’s child might have been her own father, because we see him.
When I wrote the script, I did not define who the father of Suzanna’s child is for myself. When we got to shooting, I gave the actress the idea that she should come up with her own thinking. We all did not know if she would share this secret with us, and she never did. Now, we are on tour, and she’s asked all the time, who’s the father of your child in the movie? And she says, that does not belong to you. I’m not giving this away.
Rose’s role as a man is not strictly about conformity to a very masculine presentation, at least from a contemporary perspective. Rose simply says that the trousers were enough to allow her to step into this role, thus granting her freedom. What conversations did you have with Sandra about her performance?
This was interesting because at the beginning of the project, Sandra and I discussed a lot about how to approach this. Should she try to [work out a lot], like Demi Moore in her soldier film [G.I. Jane]? Then she asked, “Should I lower my voice?” We started to laugh, because we found out my voice is higher than hers. It would have been absurd if Sandra lowered her voice to pretend to be a man for a director whose voice is much higher than hers. I think we’re still stuck in a certain way to this idea of what being male, what being female, or whatever, must be like. And I think we are all different.
One might live in peace while still being afraid of how to present oneself. For young queer people [years ago], before coming out, what is their own identity if they cannot show it, live it, and make their own experiences in the open? Finally, when they find a way to come out and speak out, they can start living in peace, finding their own freedom, and develop their own personality. These are the ideas I was much more interested in—and this does not only apply to queer people. Nowadays, we have this with social media: what is my social persona? How do I want to be perceived? We have to be aware that we are all wearing masks in our everyday lives. Some of us might not even notice because it’s just mirroring other people. Some of us are not strong enough to say, “I’m living with a certain norm that someone else defined, and I’m not so happy with it, but I don’t feel that I have the power or the strength to live in a different way”. In a way, we are all Rose.
In this sense, do you see your film in dialogue with a larger queer or trans cinematic oeuvre?
As a filmmaker, I’m not so happy when filmmakers talk so much about their own movies, because I think we make them, and now they belong to the audience. The best thing is that everyone has their own ideas. In my mind, it is a queer movie. It’s a queer story—of course it is. It deals with certain topics like trans people when the townspeople ask, “What do you actually have in your trousers right now?” It’s none of your business.
Sometimes, I have the feeling this film is seen in a very [militant way]. Yes, I did not talk about two women who fall in love. Maybe they are lesbians—who knows? But I really wanted to discuss this idea in a wider sense, to bring in each and every one who might be interested, to find themselves in their own particular queerness. To my mind, queerness, in a wider sense, can only mean that we are all queer because we are all different. I know that it is very important nowadays that we discuss queerness in certain parts and pieces. But if we can reach this point and step beyond it, maybe living together becomes easier again. There’s also a huge discussion about freedom. What is freedom? If I can live without questioning, if I feel safe, and I can forget about what I do, that’s freedom. Freedom is something you wish for—sehnsucht—[it has the sense of] a strong longing. Freedom might be an idea of desire.
Most of the time, the film deals with the idea of utopia. What do we need so we can finally come up with another idea of living together? The last famous words of Rose are: “This is how far I could get—I did what I could do.” I think this is what we all should bear in mind: that we have this one life, and we should all try to achieve what we can, because the freedom we have is something that other people risked their lives for. There’s a lot of fighting we have ahead of us. If you step away and live a quiet life and do not speak up, that’s also a political act. We still have to come back to confront ourselves with the fact that everything we do every day is political.
