About A Hidden Life
An Austrian farmer in a mountain village refuses to swear loyalty to Hitler. Terrence Malick films the Alps in his familiar wide-angle, sun-drunk register and lets the simple fact of conscientious objection — and what it costs his wife and three small daughters — fill three patient hours.
Released in 2019 and running a tight 2h 54m, A Hidden Life sits firmly in the drama tradition that American art-house cinemas have spent the last two decades quietly defending. The film is rated PG-13 and presented in English.
Director: Terrence Malick
Terrence Malick belongs to the cohort of directors whose work tends to land first at festivals — Sundance, Locarno, the New York Film Festival, SXSW — before opening on a small handful of screens in New York and Los Angeles and then rolling out, week by week, to the independent circuit elsewhere in the country. A Hidden Life is part of that pipeline. It is the only title from Terrence Malick currently in our directory; if you want to keep tabs on the director's other work, follow festival-circuit coverage from the outlets that track independent distribution.
Cast
The principal cast — August Diehl, Valerie Pachner, Maria Simon — is the kind of ensemble that art-house audiences will recognize from adjacent festival titles. Independent casting tends to favor performers who can carry a long take, hold a quiet scene, and trust a director's control of pace; this film is no exception.
Where to watch A Hidden Life
Our seasonal catalog — an editorial sample of the circuit, not a live ticketing feed — places it at independent cinemas in 12 US cities. Coverage is deepest in:
- Los Angeles, CA — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Oklahoma City, OK — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Bethesda, MD — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Dallas, TX — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Spokane, WA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Brunswick, ME — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Petaluma, CA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Winchester, KY — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Georgetown, KY — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Yankton, SD — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Osage, IA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Greenwich, CT — listed at 1 independent cinema.
If your city isn't on the list, the film may still surface on a future repertory week or festival weekend; check our full cinema directory.
Why it belongs on the indie circuit
The independent and art-house exhibition circuit exists to surface films like this one — work that doesn't fit the wide-release calendar, doesn't have the marketing budget of a studio tentpole, and depends instead on programmers, critics, and word-of-mouth to find an audience. A Hidden Life is a clean fit for that model: a 2h 54m drama work, made outside the studio system, that benefits from being seen on a real screen with a real audience rather than queued up on a streaming dashboard. The cinemas in the cities listed above are the venues doing that work for this title.
Cross-references
If you are building a viewing schedule around this film, our Drama genre hub indexes adjacent work in the same tradition.