At the European version of the Oscars, all eyes are on Sandra Hüller, who is nominated for best actress twice for Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest.German actress Sandra Hüller is the undisputed star of this year’s European Film Awards (EFAs).
Europe’s answer to the Oscars, the EFAs will be held in Berlin on December 9.
Hüller has received an unprecedented dual nomination in the best actress category for her leading roles in Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest.
Both movies were big winners at the Cannes Film Festival this year, where Anatomy of a Fall took the Palme d’Or, and The Zone of Interest won the Grand Prix, the runner-up to the Palme d’Or prize.
And both are major Academy Awards contenders as the official submissions from France and the UK for the best international feature Oscar.
Sandra Hüller is well-known among arthouse aficionados, not least for her barnstorming performance in Maren Ade’s Oscar-nominated Toni Erdmann (2016). But with Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest, 2023 could be the year the 45-year-old actress goes mainstream.
Hüller was born on April 30, 1978, and grew up in the small town of Friedrichroda in rural Thuringia, in what was then East Germany.
An inspiring teacher and a school theater course brought her to Berlin where, shortly after the Berlin Wall fell, she applied and was accepted to Berlin’s renowned Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts. She was just 17.
Her ascent to the top of Germany’s theater world was quick. In 2003, the year she graduated from Ernst Busch, Hüller was voted best young actress in a poll of German critics for Theater Heute magazine.
In Hüller’s movie debut — in Hans-Christian Schmid’s Requiem (2006) — she plays a young woman from a devout Catholic family who take her epileptic seizures and rebellious free-thinking as a sign of demonic possession. They order a brutal, ultimately fatal, exorcism.
But it was her performance a decade later, in Maren Ade’s improbably-funny German cringe comedy, Toni Erdmann, that would prove to be Hüller’s international breakout.
Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest, two radically different films, show Hüller’s tremendous range as an actress.
Anatomy is a twisty French legal drama. It is an intellectual thriller about Sandra, a successful German novelist (Hüller), living in an isolated chalet in the French Alps, who may or may not have killed her French husband, played by Samuel Theis.
Director Justine Triet, who says she wrote the film specifically with Hüller in mind, refused to tell anyone, neither her actors nor the audience, whether Sandra is guilty or innocent.
In Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, there’s little ambiguity and virtually no sign of emotion in Hüller’s turn as Hedwig Höss, the real-life wife of Rudolf Höss, the longest-serving commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
The Zone of Interest looks and feels unlike any Holocaust drama before it. The film never directly shows the atrocities of Auschwitz. There’s not a single scene of violence. Instead, the entire movie plays out like a perverse family drama as we watch Rüdiger and Hedwig Höss picnic by the river, play with their children in the garden or chat with their friends.
Taken together, An Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest show an actress at the peak of her powers. Despite some impressive rivals in the Best Actress race — Leonie Benesch for German drama The Teachers’ Lounge, Finland’s Alma Pöysti for Fallen Leaves, Mia McKenna-Bruce in the British drama How to Have Sex and Eka Chavleishvili for Georgian film Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry — Sandra Hüller’s main competition at the 2023 European Film Awards will be…Sandra Hüller.
