From Hilde, with Love: a nuanced and moving biopic of two courageous German resistance fighters

Director Andreas Dresen was raised in the German Democratic Republic, where World War II German resistance members Hilde and Hans Coppi were lauded as working-class Communist heroes, outsize figures commemorated in street names and plaques (they even graced a 1961 40 pfennig East German stamp). He was left with a sense of how alienating the idea of the brave, indomitable hero is (and how it discourages everyday dissent). And so Dresen’s quietly moving biopic reframes the Coppis as ordinary people forced into resistance by the Nazi regime, creating a human-sized story rather than a heroic one.

Dresen loves an unlikely heroine, as evidenced by his rather more comic 2022 bio-drama Rabiye Kurnaz vs George W. Bush, about a German mother’s dogged campaign to free her son from Guantánamo Bay. Here, he shoots exclusively from Hilde’s point of view (she’s played with great delicacy by Liv Lisa Fries), beginning the day of her arrest for treason in September 1942. Laila Stieler’s script splits her story deftly into two interwoven strands, one steadily following Hilde’s harrowing progression from interrogation and terrifying childbirth to the prison’s death row. The other, a clever chain of sunlit flashbacks, rolls backwards through Hilde’s work with the ‘Red Orchestra’ Berlin resistance group and a sweetly awkward then intense love affair with Hans Coppi. A character study, much more concerned with feelings than feats of derring-do, the film uses fluid semi-documentary camerawork and determinedly ahistorical styling (timeless hairstyles, few uniforms) to avoid the traditional swastika-draped, sepia-toned wartime movie aesthetic.

Dresen is determined to show the Red Orchestra cell not as a military-style resistance unit, but as a group of playful, if passionately political, young Berliners for whom resistance is just one part of lives filled with flirting, free love and heated debates at lakeside camping trips (“Property is a bourgeois category,” Hans declares of a borrowed tent) and sunny drunken lunches. The shy, prudish Hilde, wary of the group’s boho glamour and frivolity, brings practicality, touch-typing and duplication-machine professionalism to their inept counter-propaganda leafleting (the crew’s larky night-raids of haphazard fly-posting are utterly unlike the efficient public postcarding campaign practised in the 2016 resistance drama Alone in Berlin). It’s also her determination that turns Hans’s illicit Radio Moscow listening into secret letters to comfort the families of Russian-held POWs. In one lovely sequence, love and resistance work become literally entwined, the camera circling closely as Hans (Johannes Hegemann) and Hilde make love for the first time and tap out on one another’s bodies phrases in Morse code, which they are learning to try to contact the Soviets via shortwave radio.

However, the film is so strongly centred on Hilde and her journey from typist to resistance martyr and mother, that other characters (even Hans) feel short-changed. Tantalising glimpses of the Red Orchestra’s chief organiser Harro Schulze-Boysen (reckless spy, covert Communist, womaniser and serving Luftwaffe officer) suggest an intriguing story that could well merit its own movie. But Fries (best known as star of the TV series Babylon Berlin, 2017-25) gives a wonderfully nuanced performance, her expressive eyes working overtime. She expertly uncovers the strength and resilience behind Hilde’s shyness, sliding from pinched awkwardness with the resistance group to fierce love for her fragile baby son Hans Jr, born after a tense, life-threatening labour in prison. As his hand pats her face, you can see Hilde’s principled resistance to her captors warring with her longing to stay with him at any price.

Inside the prison, a sunless warren of tiny, grey-painted cells, Dresen refuses to make the Nazis monsters – even cruel guard Frau Kühn responds to Hilde’s decency, supporting her request for a pardon with an appreciative letter. There is a chilling banality about the amiable Abwehr interrogator who gives Hilde a sandwich and touches her baby bump with friendly interest rather than menace. No torture or yelling takes place, just weary questioning and paperwork. Hilde’s eventual trial isn’t the -grandstanding fight of moral courage versus Nazi evil, as seen in Sophie Scholl – The Final Days (2005): just a cursory reading of treason accusations, her defence counsel – speaking only to say he has no rebuttals – the officials are simply following the rules of the iniquitous system that surrounds them.

Thanks to this kind of thoughtful realism, the film has an unusual relatability that forces the viewer (reflecting on our own increasingly authoritarian era) to wonder if they would have been prepared to take a stand, however small and hopeless, to oppose the tyranny that others embraced without question.

► From Hilde, with Love is in UK from 27 June.