Rose premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February, where Sandra Hüller took the Silver Bear for best lead performance. A trailer has now been released, timed to the film's appearance in New York after its North American premiere at Telluride.
The premise — a woman passing as a man in a Protestant village in the aftermath of the Thirty Years' War — sounds like it could invite exactly the kind of calculated, performative transformation that awards cycles tend to reward. What Schleinzer describes instead is almost the reverse. He says Hüller rejected preparation choices that felt anachronistic, including voice-lowering, and that no two takes were the same: she might shift mid-scene from one register of masculinity to another, leaving him the problem of assembling a coherent character in the edit.
Schleinzer's interest in the material began when a friend told him that, 250 years earlier on his birthday, a woman had been executed for living as a man. He spent years researching similar cases and frames the film as a response to the current climate facing marginalised communities, not a period reconstruction. The film was shot on location near the East German border, with original sets scouted by Schleinzer through hours of hiking, and features black-and-white cinematography by Gerald Kerkletz.
Whether that directorial argument lands with audiences beyond festival circuits is the question the trailer can only partially answer.
Sophia Borg 
Gabriel Fenech 
Alexandre Noir