“Rose”, interview with director Markus Schleinzer

At the 76th Berlinale, Austrian filmmaker Markus Schleinzer presents his new film “Rose” in Competition. Starring a stunning Sandra Huller, “Rose” is a period drama rooted in a centuries-old court record and shaped by meticulous historical excavation.

In the interview, Schleinzer traces the project’s origins to an unexpected moment. “It was my birthday,” he recalls, “and a friend called to congratulate me. She’s a historian, and by coincidence she was reading a crime file about a woman who had been executed on that exact day 250 years earlier.”

The charge was “sodomy. “Female homosexuality had not been invented then”, Schleinzer notes, underlining the absurdity and violence of legal language. The case sparked his curiosity. What followed was an extended research journey into women across centuries who dressed as men for survival, for work, to avoid forced marriages, to follow loved ones into war, or to claim social and economic agency denied to them.

“The motifs were different,” he explains, “but the outcome was always the same: the desire for freedom, to define one’s own life.”

Research as Immersion

Schleinzer describes research not as preparation but as immersion and occasionally, as a trap. After the rapid trajectory of his debut, Michael (2011), which premiered in Competition at Cannes, his subsequent projects took seven and eight years, respectively. “I love research,” he admits. “Sometimes I get completely lost in it and forget that the goal is to write a script.”

For “Rose”, that meant delving into archival material, historical documents, and iconography.

Equally formative was his study of Dutch Golden Age painting. Travelling through museums in the Netherlands, Schleinzer photographed works depicting not emperors or aristocrats, but ordinary citizens. “They painted themselves. You can see poverty, you can see daily life.” In The Hague, he encountered imagery that felt strikingly proto-Western: cattle, horses, carriages, leading him to reflect on how European visual culture shaped what would later become the American Western genre. That influence subtly informs Rose, where genre echoes coexist with historical realism.

A Name as Metaphor

The title carries layered meaning. “It is a metaphor,” Schleinzer confirms. The name recalls his grandmother, Rosa, but also evokes the flower at its most beautiful precisely when it has been cut and placed in a vase. “You watch it vanish,” he says. The image resonates with a character whose assertion of identity is both an act of vitality and a confrontation with mortality.

Schleinzer has long been attentive to names. In Michael, the protagonist’s name suggested self-deification, “the one who positions himself as God.” With “Rose”, the symbolism is less theological but equally deliberate.

Against the Hero Narrative

If Rose chronicles acts that may appear revolutionary, Schleinzer resists the temptation to frame his protagonist as a hero. “I don’t believe in heroes,” he states. In an era shaped by political regression and polarised rhetoric, he questions narratives that rely on singular saviours, a sentiment that extends to mainstream cinema’s superhero mythology.

“We all should stand up and speak up,” he argues. “It’s not heroes or politicians out there. It’s us.”

For Schleinzer, storytelling that divides characters into purely good or bad fails to reflect lived reality. “I’m good, and I’m bad sometimes,” he says. The tension between personal egoism and political consequence defines Rose herself: not a conscious revolutionary, but a woman whose private acts carry radical implications.

Power, Partnership, and Ambiguity

The relationship between Rose and Susanna resists easy ccategorization Love story? Political alliance? “I’m not sure we can label it so simply,” Schleinzer reflects. What interests him most is the shifting dynamic of power between them, particularly a scene in church, where Susanna, newly empowered by conforming to social expectations, performs her status with calculated visibility.

“It’s about power,” he says. In German, he references the term Kappentausch, the exchange of caps, suggesting that change often begins as a reversal rather than a transformation. True coexistence, he implies, emerges only when the need to dominate subsides.

With “Rose”, Schleinzer constructs a historical narrative that speaks directly to contemporary anxieties: the fragility of rights, the normalisation regression, and the quiet courage required to resist both. In Competition at the Berlinale, the film stands as a meditation on identity, not as a declaration, but as a daily negotiation.

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