Winner: Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance, 2026 Berlin International Film Festival

Austria’s entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 2027 Academy Awards

In this enthralling fable of faith and social intolerance, the protean Sandra Hüller (also at this year’s Fall Focus in FATHERLAND) fully inhabits the daunting role of a 17th-century woman who has disguised herself as a male soldier in the Thirty Years’ War, only to continue the ruse after battle as she reintegrates into society. Though at first she is welcomed into the secluded, woodsy Protestant community, where she is able to own property, marry, and father a child, Rose increasingly draws suspicion from the locals as rumors about her arise. Shot in austere black-and-white, this meticulously detailed historical drama about a woman’s drive toward self-empowerment elegantly dramatizes the two-sided coin of human nature—the striving for personal freedom we all crave and the narrow-minded bigotry that stands in our way. Hüller won the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance at the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival.

—New York Film Festival guide