A first look at Sandra Hüller's latest project has arrived, though the footage reveals her in a role far removed from the courtroom dramas and architectural psychodramas that have defined her recent English-language work. The exclusive trailer for "Rose" introduces audiences to a story rooted in a painful chapter of Canadian history, told through the eyes of a pregnant sixteen-year-old Indigenous girl.
Hüller appears in a supporting role, with the emotional weight of the film carried by newcomer Passion Diabo, who plays the title character. The trailer sketches the outlines of Rose's predicament without surrendering the film's central mystery: she is a pregnant teenager removed from her community, installed in a church, and watched over by a Canadian official who has already decided what will happen to her baby once it is born.
A Story of Removal and Resistance
The official in question, identified in the film's credits as O'Byrne and described as an Indian Agent, has issued a decree: when Rose delivers, her child will be placed with a Canadian family. It is a scenario that echoes the Sixties Scoop, the decades-long practice in which Indigenous children across Canada were apprehended and placed in non-Indigenous homes, often without the consent of their families or communities.
Rose, however, is not passive. According to the film's synopsis, she refuses to name the baby's father - not to the church authorities overseeing her, and not even to her own relatives. That silence becomes the film's engine, a quiet act of defiance that eventually gives way to a revelation. The father is a young Mohawk man named Michael, and he wants the child to remain within the community.
The trailer promises a drama built on confinement and withheld information rather than overt confrontation, with Rose's months inside the church functioning as a countdown toward a birth that will be treated as a loss.
Whitebean Directs a Largely Indigenous Cast
"Rose" is directed by Roxann Whitebean, a Mohawk filmmaker, and was completed in 2022. Its compact twenty-five-minute runtime places it in short-film territory, though its narrative ambitions are substantial. The cast is drawn primarily from Indigenous performers, with Diabo leading and Eric "Dirt" McComber appearing as Michael's uncle. Mark Kupra takes the role of O'Byrne, the agent enforcing the removal. Masha Peter plays Unna, and Teresa Picciano plays Sister Clarice, the church figure presumably charged with supervising Rose through her final months of pregnancy. Merrick Diabo, Sayde Lazore, and Wendy Mayo round out the ensemble.
The film's existence has been largely under the radar in commercial terms - its TMDb rating currently registers at zero, a reflection of minimal voting activity rather than audience rejection. The exclusive trailer debut marks a belated push to bring the project to a wider viewership, one that will inevitably be amplified by Hüller's participation.
Hüller's Presence Lends International Attention
Since breaking through to global audiences with "Toni Erdmann," Hüller has become one of European cinema's most in-demand performers. Her back-to-back 2023 roles - the mother accused of murder in "Anatomy of a Fall" and the commandant of Auschwitz in "The Zone of Interest" - made her a fixture of that awards season, and she has continued to work steadily across languages and formats.
Her part in "Rose" remains unspecified in the trailer, and the film's marketing is wise not to lean on her as its center of gravity. The story belongs to Diabo's character, and the supporting cast exists to embody the institutional forces pressing in on her. Still, Hüller's name on the call sheet offers a bridge for viewers who might otherwise never encounter a twenty-five-minute Mohawk-directed drama about a period of Canadian policy that remains widely unexamined south of the border.
What the trailer makes clear is that "Rose" is less interested in spectacle than in the mechanics of control: a girl held in a church, a decree already written, a father's identity held close to the chest. The tension lies not in whether Rose will speak, but in what her silence is protecting.
No release plans beyond the film's original 2022 completion were announced alongside the trailer's debut.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
