Liv Lisa Fries gives an outstanding performance in this heartwrenchingly powerful true story from the German home front in the second world war, directed by Andreas Dresen. Fries is a star on her home turf who deserves to be better known internationally than she is, although her role in TV’s Babylon Berlin brought her a global audience. (Before this, I had seen her only in the Robert Harris adaptation Munich: The Edge of War, in a not entirely dissimilar role.)
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; she listens to radio broadcasts from Radio Moscow, sends messages back via a hidden morse-code transmitter, and prints and distributes anti-Nazi leaflets and posters. She is finally arrested while pregnant, has to give birth in the prison hospital and then has to surrender the baby, Hans Jr (with a plea that her own mother looks after him), before she is led away to execution.
Hilde’s story, told here by interspersing scenes of her grim prison life and the first summer of her love affair with Hans, is comparable to that of iconic anti-Hitler activist Sophie Scholl, but this is a more adult, passionate drama. Johannes Hegemann plays Hans; Lisa Wagner plays the hard-faced prison warder Fraulein Kühn, who softens towards her wretched prisoner as the dark day approaches; Alexander Scheer plays the diffident, sensitive prison-visiting pastor, who does his best to soothe her but is inscrutably present when the final sentence is pronounced and appears ineffectual and even blandly complicit. As Hilde’s condition deteriorates in prison, Fries’s portrayal is devastating.
• From Hilde, With Love is in UK and Irish cinemas from 27 June.
