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| Sandra Hüller. Telluride Film Festival. |
Telluride Film Festival (TFF) 2026
Chuck Jones' Cinema, Mountain Village, 6 Sep 2026
TFF 2026 Program Guide:
Bilge Ebiri (TFF): "By any imaginable metric, Sandra Hüller is having an incredible year. February, she won Best Actress at Berlin for her remarkable turn in Markus Schleinzer’s ROSE. In March, we saw her scene-stealing supporting turn in the surprise sci-fi hit PROJECT HAIL MARY. May brought us her central performance in Paweł Pawlikowski’s masterful Cannes-winner FATHERLAND. And in October, she will star opposite Tom Cruise in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s much-speculated-about DIGGER. One might be tempted to call Hüller’s flurry of activity and accomplishment a fluke. Still, the truth is that this level of excellence and engagement has become standard in Hüller’s career: Her previous annus mirabilis was just two years ago. In 2023, she starred in two of that year’s most acclaimed pictures, Justine Triet’s ANATOMY OF A FALL (which won the Palme d’Or and earned her an Oscar nomination) and Jonathan Glazer’s THE ZONE OF INTEREST, which won Cannes’ Grand Prix and Best International Feature at the Academy Awards. Even as her film career rises to new levels, the actress continues her acclaimed work on the German stage, where she has won several major awards. She recently had her directorial debut with Penthesile:a:s at the Neues Theater Halle in 2025."
"Theater acting requires projection to reach the audience in the back rows. Film acting, on the other hand, demands subtlety, as the camera magnifies the most minute gestures. Remarkably, Hüller has mastered both. Her characters, though they may vary wildly, are united in the fact that we love watching them think, perform, and be. In ROSE, Hüller plays a woman who poses as a male soldier during the Thirty Years’ War, shows up in a remote village and claims to be the male heir of a sizable plot of land. We know very little of her past, other than the scar that marks her face and the flattened bullet she chews on. The austerity of Schleinzer’s style and the story’s enigmatic quality ensure that the film’s drama and heartbreak are all contained within the tension on the soldier’s face. And when it finally breaks (as a Hüller performance almost always does, with each of her characters working their way towards catharsis), the results are astounding. “She’s able to evoke both this tremendous empathy and at the same time be incredibly cold,” Triet said to The Hollywood Reporter in 2023. “She can be incredibly tough and then just sort of melt.”"
"Both ROSE and FATHERLAND are tales of characters caught between realities. Pawlikowski’s film follows the author Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Hüller) as they return to post-war Germany, where he will receive honors from both the West and the East. Thomas and Erika are, in effect, people without a country, and their geographic, political, and personal journey embodies their alienation. Which brings us to another facet of many of Hüller’s performances: Even as she portrays specific people with seemingly real inner lives, she also allows something more cosmic to slip through. These characters speak to truths that feel eternal."
–Bilge Ebiri
The program includes a selection of clips, an on-stage interview and ROSE, shown in its entirety.
S/Sat 6:45PM - C/Sun 9AM
Introduced by Jason Silverman.
Interview in English with Scott Foundas 30 min.
CLIP REEL:
REQUIEM
TONI ERDMANN
SIBYL
THE ZONE OF INTEREST
SUSI & I
ANATOMY OF A FALL
I REFUSE TO ROT INSIDE
PROJECT HAIL MARY
AA: In tears, Sandra Hüller received a standing ovation. 2026 is another great year for her with Rose, Fatherland, Project Hail Mary and Digger (forthcoming). She told us that she "does not think much about the camera" and claims that she "doesn't know anything about the technical side such as framing". The mere mention of Toni Erdmann made her laugh. She "loves to sing and does it all the time". In Sibyl she was asked by Justine Triet to play her. In Anatomy of a Fall "we agreed we don't know the solution. It is not what the film is about". The Zone of Interest: "it is difficult for Germans to play Nazis". Rose and Fatherland are love letters to people who have to hide who they are.
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