‘Great Freedom’ (‘Grosse Freiheit’): Film Review | Cannes 2021 David Rooney
Anyone familiar with Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s powerful 2000 documentary feature,
Paragraph 175, will recognize that title as the provision of the German penal code that sanctioned horrific Nazi persecution of homosexuals, a law dating back to 1871. What’s more startling is that criminal prosecution continued in West Germany up until the late 1960s, destroying the lives of thousands of men, and that full decriminalization did not come until 1994. Sebastian Meise’s intricately structured drama explores the life of one man put through that dehumanizing system on a loop in the decades following World War II.