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.
