'She's the queen': Markus Schleinzer on Sandra Hüller and Austria's Oscar entry Rose

Markus Schleinzer has watched Rose more than 100 times, and Sandra Hüller's performance still makes him cry. It also makes him angry.

The Austrian director said as much in an interview with Variety published on Oct. 14, 2026, as the film screened at the Vancouver International Film Festival. He called Hüller "the queen".

Rose is Schleinzer's third feature film, a black-and-white historical drama starring Hüller, according to Variety. In it, Hüller plays a woman who disguises herself as a male soldier in 17th-century Germany. The character is trying to build a life of substance at a time when women faced tight restrictions on access to land, according to the Berlinale.

The film will now carry Austria's hopes in the awards season. Austria's selection committee picked Rose as the country's submission for Best International Feature Film at the Academy Awards, the Oscar category for films made outside the United States, Screen Daily reported on Aug. 14.

That selection followed a strong launch in Berlin. Rose screened in Competition at the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival, and Hüller received the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance on Feb. 21, 2026. The prize is gender-neutral, open to performers of any gender, and it arrived 20 years after her first Silver Bear, according to the Berlinale. At that same awards ceremony, "Yellow Letters" won the Golden Bear, Variety reported.

Schleinzer told Variety he wrote the role specifically for Hüller. The project began as a roughly 1,000-page prose work tracing Rose's life from early childhood. For the film, he skipped the first 800 pages and concentrated on the last 200 pages. Hüller's first reaction to the script was blunt: "You are crazy. This is not a script. That's a poem."

Schleinzer, an Austrian director and actor, came to directing after a 17-year career as a casting director, including work for Michael Haneke. Haneke urged him to become a filmmaker and gave him three months to write a script, he told Variety.

What makes this stand out is how personal the collaboration sounds. A director who once found actors for other people now says he cannot get through his own film unmoved, even after 100 viewings.