Set in post-war Germany, Hans is a gay man living in a particularly awful era of Paragraph 175, a piece of homophobic legislation first employed in 1871 and not fully eradicated until 1994. “I am always scared of wasting time,” says Franz Rogowski from his home in Berlin, two days into a lockdown sentence determined by a positive Covid test, “and time doesn’t care.” As Hans Hoffman, the protagonist in Sebastian Meise’s second feature film, the prize-winning Great Freedom (it picked up a Jury Prize at Cannes last year), Rogowski is similarly at the mercy of time’s passing, albeit under a wholly different set of circumstances.
