Anthony Hopkins in a Schindler-style true story: One Life trailer
The moving story of Nicholas Winton, who saved hundreds of Jewish children during World War II.
It’s a story in history that few people know about. And cinema could well help put Nicholas Winton into posterity, as it did for Oskar Schindler. The film A life will tell the story of how a young British man saved hundreds of Jewish children during World War II. Johnny Flynn will play Winton during the conflict while Anthony Hopkins will be his older version, in 1988, as a BBC program pays tribute to him, allowing him to meet some of the children he saved at the time. Footage of the real show can be seen on YouTube and has gone viral (41 million views to date).
“Nicky Winton, a young London stockbroker, saved 669 children from the Nazis in the months before World War II. Nicky traveled to Prague in December 1938 and found families who had fled the rise of the Nazis in Germany and Austria, living in desperate conditions, with little or no shelter and food, and under threat of imminent invasion. He immediately realized that it was a race against time. How much how many children would he and his team be able to save before the borders closed?” announces the synopsis. “Fifty years later, in 1988, Nicky lives haunted by the fate of the children he was unable to bring to safety in England; always blaming himself for not having done more. It was only when a BBC television program surprised him – introducing him to these now-adult surviving children – that he finally began to come to terms with the guilt and grief he had carried for five decades.”
A life is directed by James Hawkes from a screenplay written by Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake. Helena Bonham Carter, Lena Olin and Jonathan Pryce complete the cast. The film was presented in September at the Toronto International Film Festival. It will be released in cinemas in France on February 21, 2024.
