Guy Lodge Film CriticLike a scene of the 1969 moon landing seen on a prison TV late in “Great Freedom” — “I thought it would be more exciting,” muses one inmate — seismic change seems less spectacular when charted against the everyday grind of life behind bars in this gripping, tender-hearted prison drama from Austrian director Sebastian Meise.
That extends to another historical milestone from the same summer: the West German authorities’ easing of Paragraph 175, by which men had hitherto been imprisoned for homosexual acts.