The Rose King

Ana, and her son Albert, live in a grand mansion in Portugal, where the latter spends most of his time taking care of a rose garden. Mother and son have their private rituals, but they are interrupted by the passion that Albert develops for the young Arnold. Albert imprisons Arnold and adores him as he adores his roses – possessively, as if he were an object. Through this strange love triangle, the film takes the underlying homoeroticism in most of Schroeter’s work and brings it to the surface, sometimes as a whisper, sometimes in a scream.

Duration: 106'
Production year: 1986
Country: DE, FR, PT, NL
Language: DE Subtitles: PT

Rotterdam Film Festival 1986 – Best Feature Film

Werner Schroeter

Central to the New German Cinema of the 1970s, Werner Schroeter was born in 1945 into a German bourgeois family and died in 2010. He studied psychology for three terms at the University of Mannheim before abandoning his studies to enrol at the Munich Film School, which he also left after three weeks. In 1967, he attended the Knokke Experimental Film Festival, where he discovered the New American Cinema—particularly Twice a Man (1964) by Gregory J. Markopoulos—which opened Schroeter to a filmmaking practice that was equally poetic and personal. His cinematic oeuvre was later characterised as an exploration of the elemental forces of love, death, and life, enriched by diverse apparitions and utopian visions. The support of German television during the 1970s enabled him to direct his first masterpiece, The Death of Maria Malibran (1971), starring Montezuma. Between his first feature film and his arduous final journey with This Night (2008), any list of Schroeter’s best works must include his neo-realist saga The Reign of Naples (1979), Die Generalprobe (1980), King of Roses (1986), and his final masterpieces, Malina (1991) and Deux (2002), both featuring powerful performances by Isabelle Huppert.

Original title: Der Rosenkönig

Werner Schroeter

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