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Irish Times
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
From Hilde, with Love: A powerful, elegiac story of resistance to the Third Reich
From Hilde, With Love Director : Andreas Dresen Cert : None Genre : Biography, War Starring : Starring Liv Lisa Fries, Johannes Hegemann, Lisa Wagner, Alexander Scheer, Emma Bading, Sina Martens, Lisa Hrdina, Lena Urzendowsky, Hans-Christian Hegewald, Nico Ehrenteit, Jacob Keller Running Time : 2 hrs 6 mins Stories of German resistance to the Third Reich have variously featured Tom Cruise, Julia Jentsch and Cillian Murphy performing daredevil deeds. From the outset, Andreas Dresen's follow-up to Rabiye Kurnaz vs George W Bush offers a different, steely kind of heroism. Long before we hear the real-life narration of the historian Hans Coppi jnr, From Hilde, with Love has re-created his activist parents to powerful, elegiac effect. Coppi jnr was a baby when he was handed to his grandmother at the gates of Barnimstrasse women's prison following the execution of his Communist mother and father. A prison guard, Anneliese Kühn (Lisa Wagner), wrote a letter to allow his condemned mother to continue breastfeeding. But Adolf Hitler refused the request for clemency. The Coppis and their like-minded comrades in the Red Orchestra – a catch-all term the internal police used to denote any dissenters – were quiet idealists learning to tap Morse code and listening in to Voice of Russia for news of German POWs against the backdrop of the crumbling Reich. READ MORE Laila Stieler's screenplay characterises the couple as full-blooded, carnal, spirited people, given to neither grand pontification nor cinematic heroism. They giddily run away after posting pro-Soviet political slogans at night. They fall madly in love, their sexual encounters framed as domestic acts of defiance. It's an Austen-worthy coupling. Editor Jörg Hauschild's temporal jumps introduce Hilde as a Miss Lonelyhearts transformed by romance, defiance and carnality. Their summery encounters, gorgeously shot by the cinematographer Judith Kaufmann, are starkly counterpointed by their wretched capture and incarceration. Hilde tenderly cares for the baby she gives birth to in jail, devastated by the loss of her husband and knowing her stay can end only with death by guillotine. Hilde Coppi, played with fragile depth by Liv Lisa Fries, is a cinematic portrait for the ages. In cinemas from Friday, June 27th
Times
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
From Hilde, with Love review — a gripping drama about Nazi dissidents
The doughty and idealistic activities of the Nazi resistance group Red Orchestra is the focus of this often gripping historical drama from the veteran German director Andreas Dresen. The setting is war-era Berlin, and the subjects are the young married agitators Hilde (Liv Lisa Fries) and Hans Coppi (Johannes Hegemann). We meet the couple first in late 1942, when they have been captured and imprisoned by the Gestapo and are marked for execution by guillotine, or fallbeil ('falling axe'). The film's fluid, flashback-filled structure illustrates their past political activities and blossoming relationship while repeatedly returning to prison sequences that slide inexorably towards doom. Dresen's aesthetic style is unashamedly contrapuntal, with flashback footage bathed in golden glows and slammer scenes mostly cold grey and sickly green. The guttural connection between Hilde and Hans takes precedence over their revolutionary acts in a film that tacitly acknowledges the symbolic, rather than practical, achievements of Red Orchestra. This is, we learn, an ensemble of guileless aesthetes, intellectuals and hedonists who enjoy beer, dancing and swinging (the partner-swapping kind) by the lake, and who aim to inspire civil disobedience by secretly pasting words such as 'hunger' and 'lies' over the state's propaganda posters. At the same time, in the summer of 1942, over 250,000 residents of the Warsaw Ghetto were being shipped off to the Treblinka death camp. • Read more film reviews, guides about what to watch and interviews Dresen's masterstroke is to play out the flashbacks in reverse, with the central romantic relationship winding backwards from its histrionic conclusion to its tiny tremulous beginnings. It's been done before, most effectively in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and in François Ozon's 5×2, but here the shadow of imminent death makes every glance more urgent, every embrace a gesture of defiance. Fries is astounding as Hilde and ultimately carries the film. Her characterisation is part mousey passivity, part furious leonine power. She telegraphs Hilde's internal strength in every scene. Even when facing the falling axe. ★★★★☆15, 125minIn cinemas from Jun 27 Times+ members can enjoy two-for-one cinema tickets at Everyman each Wednesday. Visit to find out more. Which films have you enjoyed at the cinema recently? Let us know in the comments and follow @timesculture to read the latest reviews
