Dir: Andreas Dresen | Cast: Main cast: Liv Lisa Fries, Johannes Hegemann, Lisa Wagner, Alexander Scheer, Emma Bading, Sina Martins, Lisa Hrdina, Lena Urzendowsky, Nico Ehrenteit | Germany. Drama. 124’
This German drama opens with a young Berlin woman being arrested and thrown into a grim prison cell for colluding with her lover in anti-Nazi resistance activities during the Second World War.
What soon emerges is the real life story of Hilde Breiter and her Communist activist husband Hans Coppi. We watch the couple gradually falling in love during a blissful summer of 1942 but their activities are condemned and their life falls apart after the birth, in prison, of their baby son Hans who, age 80, provides the VoiceOver for the final scene of this heart-wrenching true story, little known outside Germany, of radical free-thinking young people, a far cry from the much trumpeted ‘Hitler’s Youth’.
Babylon Berlin star Liv Lisa Fries is captivating as a woman who, on the face of it, seems innocent, drawn into a series of attempts to contact, by means of a radio transmitter, German prisoners of war in Russia and relay messages of hope to their families.
Almost entirely seen from Hilde’s perspective, the focus here is a intimate and tender experience of love, childbirth and parenthood and it’s that human love story that gives the film its emotional heft – and it moves you to tears – with the resistance element feeling like a informative backstory to this more meaningful tragedy about abject cruelty inflicted during wartime.
The narrative unfolds in flashbacks to that endless, lakeside, sun-dappled summer as clouds darken to reveal what actually happened when this vulnerable but resilient and reliable young woman is drawn into illegal activities in providing vital assistance to her husband Hans (Hegemann) and his circle of rebels as they indulge in their efforts to countermand the Nazi regime by rewording Nazi propaganda posters.
Although the authorities are brutal in dealing with Hilde and the other woman involved in the resistance: she is humiliatingly strip searched and viciously cross-examined. But there are redeeming characters in Laila Stieler’s script: a sympathetic midwife who helps Hilda give birth, against the odds, a kindly prison chaplain (Sheer) and even a stern prison warder (Wagner) whose hard-faced demeanour gradually softens. But all this only goes to make the tragedy more poignant. @MeredithTaylor
IN UK & IRISH CINEMAS from 28 JUNE 2025