Sandra Hülser had a lightning career to become an international cinema star. Last May, two films starring her were shown in competition at the Cannes Festival, “The Zone of Interest” by Jonathan Glazer and “Anatomy of a Case” by Justine Triet, which then won the Palme d’Or. Sandra Hülser as Hedwig, the wife of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höß, and as a novelist who is suspected of having pushed her husband out of the window into a fatal fall… two female roles that create oppressive cracks in the facade of bourgeois society to make visible. Hülser received excellent reviews and received the César, the French film award, for best actress. And when the Oscars are awarded in Hollywood tonight, Sandra Hueller also there: her performance in “Anatomy of a Case” earned her the nomination for best female lead; “Anatomy of a Case” and “The Zone of Interest” were nominated in the best film category.
To mark this occasion, Arte has put four early films with Sandra Hülser in the media library, including her first feature film, “Requiem”, 2006, by Hans-Christian Schmid. Hülser plays Michaela, a girl from a religious family. She studies education in Tübingen, has epileptic seizures, believes she is possessed by the devil, and is the victim of an exorcism. A disturbing little film about social and religious repression and its downside, a young person’s fear of freedom. “I actually know a fundamental doubt about beautiful things, or happiness itself, quite well,” said Hülser about this character and his problems. In 2006 she received the German Film Prize for this. She also got it in 2017 for “Toni Erdmann”, by Maren Ade, which is also a film about repression, about self-repression: Hülser as a cool, uptight business woman who has to let her father, Peter Simonischek, show her what freedom is and the happiness of anarchy.
“Anatomy of a Case” and “The Zone of Interest” had a strong influence on Hülser, and the four films on Arte show that she is also a wonderful team player. In “Amour fou” by Jessica Hausner, 2016, she is one of the young women, highly teased and with correct nobility, who her friend, the poet Heinrich von Kleist, asks: Would you want to die with me? The boy looks for a dying partner and finally finds her in the sick Henriette Vogel. A film in exquisite tableaux, Christian Friedel plays Kleist, who can no longer be helped on earth – in “The Zone of Interest” he is Hülser’s husband, the concentration camp head Rudolf Höß.
She is a young warehouse worker in a wholesale market who falls in love with the lonely Franz Rogowski, a forklift driver. A shy, crazy love in which Sandra Hülser’s flirtatious shyness comes into play wonderfully.