Original Title: In Liebe, Eure Hilde
Germany • Docudrama • Year: 2024 • Running time: 125 mins
Language: German
Audience Response: 18 slips returned
- ‘Excellent’: 11 votes
- Very Good’: 6 votes
- ‘Good’: 1 vote
- ‘Satisfactory’: 0 votes
- ‘Poor’: 0 votes
Read the comments here or visit the “From Hilde, With Love” discussion page to join in the conversation.
Synopsis:
In Berlin 1942, Hilde finds her place within an anti-Nazi resistance group as gradually as she falls in love with one of its members, Hans Coppi. With their lives being in constant danger, the two spend an unforgettable summer until they get caught by the Gestapo and Hilde Coppi is imprisoned, eight months pregnant.
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.
Peter Bradshaw (The Guardian)
Director: Andreas Dresen
Gundermann (2018) / Stopped On Track (2011) / Cloud 9 (2009)
Writer: Laila Stieler
Main Cast:
| Liv Lisa Fries | Hilde Coppi |
| Johannes Hegemann | Hans Coppi |
| Lisa Wagner | Anneliese Kühn |
| Alexander Scheer | Pfarrer Harald Poelchau |
(for full cast list, additional technical information and reviews, please visit the From Hilde, With Love pages in IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes)
CFC Film Notes:
The Guardian’s film critic, Peter Bradshaw, really liked this film, giving it four stars. Liv Lisa Fries gives an outstanding performance in this heart-wrenchingly powerful true story from the German home front in the 2nd World War. She is a well-known actress in Germany but not internationally, though some may have seen her in TV’s “Babylon Berlin”.
Fries plays anti-Nazi resistance activist (yes, there were many!) Hilde Coppi, a member of a group which would later be called ‘Red October’. Hilde, a dental assistant in Berlin, 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. While pregnant, she is finally arrested and has to give birth in the prison hospital, surrendering her baby, Hans Jr., with a plea that her own mother looks after him. She is then executed.
Johannes Hegemann plays Hans. Lisa Wagner is the hard-faced prison warder Fraulein Kuhn, who softens towards her wretched prisoner towards the end. What sense will we make of the role of the prison’s visiting pastor, apparently soothing Hilde while, inscrutably, present as the death sentence is pronounced, appearing ineffectual, even blandly complicit, in her fate?
Another critic, Leslie Felpen, writing in The Hollywood Reporter, called this film “ top-draw humanist cinema…[it] speaks, like its heroine, with a soft voice about the importance of love, and the deep need to do something right, no matter how small, to defy corrupt, monstrous regimes.” A message for our times? Hilde clearly did ‘no small thing’, but possibly the greatest thing anyone can do: sacrificing her life.