In Praise of Connection: Max Hegewald on the Making of <i>Free at Heart</i>

Actor, director, and writer Max Hegewald’s documentary Silvia Is My Name (2020) premiered at the Max Ophüls Festival. His latest, the feature-length fiction Free at Heart was released at the Olso/Fusion International Film Festival in 2025. In this interview, we discuss this project. We go over his experiences as an actor and a director and his inspirations for this film. Set in a small town in Germany, Free at Heart follows the experiences of 16-year-old Sebastian (Linus Moog) who discovers (among many things) that his mother (Annika Kuhl) is not, in fact, his biological mother and that he has a biological brother in the 15-year-old Kolja (Aurel Klug). Sebastian’s family adopts Kolja, with whom he begins to fall in love. This interview attends to Hegewald’s depiction of gender, notably how the boys (unsuccessfully) navigate their homophobic town, how Hegewald comes to terms with Sebastian’s sexuality, and how his film negotiates between incest and the characters’ romance.