Once a month, Parallax examines today's cinema through the lens of yesterday's. This month, Rose by Markus Schleinzer recalls an Estonian film rediscovered at the last FEMA La Rochelle: Werewolf (1968) by Leida Laius. Rose, the third film by Markus Schleinzer, follows the trajectory of a woman (Sandra Hüller) who claims to be a man. After the Thirty Years' War, she establishes herself under a false identity in a remote village, where she leads a prosperous life until an incident reveals the deception and exposes her to the villagers' anger. If the film's ending, centered on a trial, obviously looks towards The Passion of Joan of Arc by Carl Theodor Dreyer (1927), Rose also dialogues with a less well-known film: Werewolf (1968) by Estonian director Leida Laius, which also portrays an "intruder" in a rural village in Eastern Europe. Tiina, taken in after her mother's execution, suspected of witchcraft, grows up alongside Margus, with whom a romance develops. But once she becomes an adult, she is accused of being a werewolf by another peasant apparently jealous, which forces her into exile. Less austere than Schleinzer's film, Werewolf, whose strangeness vaguely recalls that of a giallo, moves between the present time and flashbacks through sound and plastic details - a flash of sunlight, a reflection on water or the sound of a rattle recall a past event. Like Rose, accompanied by a voice-over with the air of a fable, Werewolf frees itself from a realistic framework to approach a philosophical fable. Set respectively in the 17th and 19th centuries, the films seem to evolve in an immemorial time, allowing for a broader reflection on the principle of community and its xenophobic and coercive dimensions. Hence a particular attention to the rituals that bind the social group: bonfires, meals and collective work (Werewolf), marriage, mass and public execution (Rose). The common choice of black and white participates in a dialectic that opposes the community and its outside by emphasizing the contrast between the dark interior of the home and the outside bathed in harsh light. In this regard, two key scenes respond to each other, highlighting the rigor of Leida Laius's staging and one of Schleinzer's fine formal ideas. At the end of Werewolf, Tiina appears at her former home, where Margus and his parents are having dinner. The editing then relies on a strict partition between the family circle (drawn by a 360-degree panoramic shot at the beginning of the scene) and Tiina's satellite position, as well as between the interior and the exterior, whose separation traces a boundary in the middle of the shots. Tiina's return proves impossible and, despite her feelings, Margus will not be able to join her, imprisoned by his belonging to the group. Despite its tragic ending, Rose briefly opens a more optimistic parenthesis than the impasse of Werewolf. Suzanna, a young peasant married to Rose, only discovers her femininity late, when she tries to care for her "husband" unconscious after a bee sting. The two women, however, manage to prolong their union: Rose keeps her property, while Suzanna benefits from an equal treatment rather than submitting to a role as a housewife. A shot skillfully synthesizes this attempt to escape the dictates of the community. When Suzanna learns the truth about Rose, she closes the shutters of her room, each pierced by a small opening. The window panes, whose geometric patterns evoke the cells of a hive, thus disappear in favor of weak rays of light: symbolically, Suzanna pushes back the influence of the "hive" (an image of a uniform and dominant collective, which also refers to the sting endangering Rose's secret) to make emerge two singular lines - an image of the path the two women hope to trace side by side.