From Hilde, With Love (15)

(Subtitled)

Director Andreas Dresen creates a human-sized story rather than a heroic one with his portrayal of anti-Nazi dissents, set during Hilde Coppi’s trial for treason in wartime Berlin.

Lisa Fries (a star on her home turf) gives an outstanding performance in this heartwrenchingly powerful true story from the German home front in the second world war. Fries plays anti-Nazi resistance activist Hilde Coppi, a dental assistant in Berlin who falls in love with Hans Coppi, a communist who is hiding a Soviet parachutist. It’s also her determination that turns Hans’s illicit Radio Moscow listening into secret letters, via morse-code, to comfort the families of Russian-held POWs. She is finally arrested while pregnant, has to give birth in the prison hospital and then has to surrender the baby, Hans Jr, before she is led away to execution.

This is a character study bursting with passion and drama; much more concerned with feelings than feats of derring-do, the film avoids the traditional swastika-draped, sepia-toned wartime movie aesthetic (and refuses to reduce Nazis to comical villains), instead invoking a thoughtful realism, which gives it an unusual relatability. Don’t miss.