Parky At the Pictures (27/6/2025)

(Reviews of From Hilde, With Love; Red Path; Chicken Town; and Sudan, Remember Us)

FROM HILDE, WITH LOVE.

Several critics have noted the similarities between Andreas Dresen's From Hilde, With Love and Marc Rothemund's Sophie Scholl - The Final Days (2005). But it actually belongs to a tradition of films depicting German women resisting the Nazi regime that also includes Alfred Vohrer's Everyone Dies Alone (1976), which was remade by Vincent Pérez as Alone in Berlin (2016), Helma Sanders-Brahms's Germany, Pale Mother (1980), and Max Färberböck's Aimée & Jaguar (1999) and A Woman in Berlin (2008).

Arrested in 1942 while picking strawberries with her mother, Hilde Coppi (Liv Lisa Fries) is accused of helping husband Hans (Johannes Hegemann) send radio messages to Moscow. She insists he was merely practicing before being called up, but the interrogators don't believe her, even though one had asked to touch her pregnant belly because his own wife was expecting a little miracle.

Trying to be watchfully evasive in her answers, the bespectacled Hilde claims to know nothing about Albert Hößler (Hans-Christian Hegewald), the Soviet airman that Hans has supposedly been hiding. But, amidst flashbacks to happier times with friends, she identifies photographs of Ina Ender-Lautenschläger (Emma Bading), Heinrich Scheel (Jacob Keller), and Harro (Nico Ehrenteit) and Libertas Schulze-Boysen (Sina Martens).

In her cell, Hilde tries to exercise and keep calm. However, she goes into labour and the midwife proves kind and encouraging under the stern gaze of warder Anneliese Kühn (Lisa Wagner). The doctor sneers that baby Hans won't live long, but the midwife allows Hilde to nurse him on the ward, where she finds herself in the next bed to Liane Berkowitz (Lena Urzendowsky). Afraid that the child will be taken away, Hilde is relieved when she finally starts producing milk.

Cutting back in time, Hilde scolds friend Grete Jäger (Lisa Hrdina) for consorting with a married soldier. But they listen to the radio broadcasts from Moscow and send letters to the families of the prisoners of war they hear being interviewed because the government claimed that the Red Army executed all German captives. On another occasion, they send a Morse message of good wishes and are thrilled to get a reply.

Before the war, Hilde was dating Franz and her mother (Tilla Kratochwil) had been against her marrying Hans because she thought he was reckless in being part of a group of left-leaning sympathisers that issued leaflets and flyposted slogans condemning the Nazis and advocating the Communist line. Initially, Hilde had supported Hans because she had fallen in love with him, but she confides in Liane that she expects to remain in jail as a political prisoner, even though her circumstances have improved because the doctor has discovered that she had worked as a dental assistant and he gives her chores around the ward, much to Kühn's annoyance.

She's more sympathetic when Hilde is allowed to visit Hans and Kühn allows her to take a bath and wear a red dress. He is nervous to hold Hansi, but Hilde helps him change a nappy. They reminisce about the wonderful summer of 1941, when he had asked her to help him learn Morse and they had tumbled into bed together. As she didn't think she could conceive, they were overjoyed when Hilde became pregnant, but they agreed that they had to keep taking risks to promote the Party and resist the tyranny of the Third Reich after the launch of Operation Barbarossa.

But things didn't always run smoothly, as Hans didn't think that Hilde was as committed as Grete, Ina, or Libertas, who takes covert photographs to aide the cause. On seeing her dark room, Hilde feels bad for thinking that Libertas was a party girl (as she was having a fling with husband Harro's knowledge). But she knows she has responsibilities to her sickly mother and can't afford to get ideas above her station.

Shortly after she has consoled Liane after her baby is removed, Hilde is returned to her prison wing. Kühn allows her to see Ina in the next cell and turns a blind eye when they whisper messages in the exercise yard. But Hilde faints on being told in December 1942 that Hans has been sentenced to the guillotine and hardly hears Ina's assurance that they will pardon her for having merely been led astray.

Shortly afterwards, Hilde receives a visit from Pastor Harald Poelchau (Alexander Scheer), who brings her a poem that Hans wrote before his execution. The Schulze-Boysens died alongside him and Hilde hears the news with sang froid. She thinks back to helping Grete dress Ina for a fashion show, with Swedish singing star Zarah Leander among the clients. She had taken up Greta's place on a camping weekend and Hans had helped her put up her tent. Around the campfire, Hilde had been shocked by Libertas kissing her lover in front of Harro and she had overheard one of the men saying the women called her `The Governess' because she was such a prude. But Hans had taken a shine to her and soon afterwards had asked her to help him master Morse.

Back at Barnimstrasse, Hilde is summoned from her cell and rides with Liane in a prison truck. She meets Heinrich and asks him to hold her and the guard doesn't object. At the court building, however, Ina is ordered to keep quiet when she blames Hans and Libertas for betraying their comrades and Hilde refuses to listen. Her defence offers nothing in mitigation at her trial and Hilde's only defence is that she loved her husband. On returning to her cell, she finds a black ribbon nailed to the door and she sobs in the darkness when Kühn informs her that she's now on death row.

Hilde thinks back to the time when she had first known Hans. He had just got out of prison and they had come to collect Grete after her release and Hilde had been jealous watching the pair splash in the lake after riding through the country on Hans's motorbike and sidecar. When they had posed as members of a book club having gathered for a planning meeting at a café, Hilde had bailed out the careless bohemians when the nosy Frau Lampert (Franziska Ritter) had quizzed them about the text and she was the only one to have had the foresight to read it in advance. Hans had been grateful, but too wrapped up in Grete to notice. But Frau Rake had realised that Hilde was in a bad mood when she got home and snapped when she asked for news about her fiancé.

Now, in early 1943, Hilde has to break the news to her mother that she's going to be guillotined and Kühn tends to the baby when Frau Rake's bawling makes him cry. Hilde asks her mother to care for the child, as he is now all that matters. When the Führer refuses to grant her clemency, Hilde entrusts Hansi to Kühn after spending a final night together. She is then transported to Plötzensee Prison, where her hair is cut to ensure it doesn't get entangled with the blade.

Pastor Poelchau visits her and she dictates a final letter to her mother. She asks him how it has come to this, having thought about the first time she saw Hans at a wedding and had cycled to the boathouse where he hid a duplicating machine to help him and Ina type anti-Nazi propaganda. The cleric arranges for Hilde to have a change of clothing when breast milk stains her tunic and she recites a childhood prayer and fights back fear and panic, as she learns that she will be taken out around 7pm on 5 August 1943.

Liane falls to the ground in the line in front of Hilde, who tries to remain calm and let the sun shine on her face. Each woman is taken into a brick bunker, where the sentence is read to her before she is placed face down under the blade. The pastor stands behind the desk to offer his support, but Hilde shows no emotion as she is led away.

In voiceover, Hansi explains that he is now 80 years old and has never stopped reading the letters his parents sent to each other while in prison. He visited the archive in Moscow to learn more about the messages that his father had sent to the Russians and discovered that only one had got through because of the radio's limited range: `We wish our friends the very best.' The film ends with Hilde and Hans dancing awkwardly on the night they first met and couldn't take their eyes off each other.

An exceptional performance from Liv Lisa Fries holds together this compelling, if fussily fragmented biopic. Andreas Dresen and co-scenarist Laila Stieler are wise to eschew linearity and use flashbacks to show how Hilde Coppi came to be seen as an enemy of the state. They are shrewder still in stripping the action of Nazi-era signifiers to suggest that a similar kind of injustice could happen anywhere in the world in our own age. But the cutaways from the prison scenes sometimes seem haphazard, especially when they don't appear to be memories that Hilde is revisiting in her cell.

It doesn't help that we learn little about Hilde's background and nothing about her politics before she became involved with what has come to be known as `The Red Orchestra'. Hans is even more sketchily limned and it's not always apparent from Johannes Hegemann's performance why Hilde would forget about her soldier beau so easily and take such reckless risks for a cause she embraces largely because she's in love rather than from any sense of outrage or conviction.

With the flashbacks going undated, it's difficult to know when scenes are actually taking place. By the same token, the other members of the cabal wander in and out without making much impression. Indeed, more time is spent with prison figures like Liane, Kühn, and Poelchau than Hilde's fellow zealots.

Dresen also shows us little of what the Red Orchestra does by way of producing or disseminating materials and gives next to no impression of the impact that their actions and ideas have to render them such a credible threat to the Reich. Moreover, given the nature of the state, they seem to operate with scant jeopardy, as the most dangerous threat to their enterprise that we see comes from an elderly snoop who comes across their far from covert café reading circle.

Susanne Hopf's production design is highly effective, as are Birgitt Kilian's costumes, particularly when it comes to the Nazi uniforms. Cinematographer Judith Kaufmann achieves telling contrasts between the confined spaces and the settings for the blissful summer. Yet, in seeking to avoid specificity, Dresen struggles to convey the sense of a nation at war or the notion that this is a pivotal moment in the tide turning against the Axis.

Raised in an East Germany where the Red Orchestra were hailed as socialist heroes, Dresen uses measured long takes to capture the contrasting emotions in the prison, as Hilde bonds with her baby and gains the respect of her fellow detainees and the staff. Fries movingly conveys the intensity of Hilde's love for a son from whom she knows she will soon be parted. The tenderness of these scenes is as harrowing as the sight of the line of women shuffling towards the guillotine shed. Notwithstanding such poignancy, this earnestly sincere and adroitly made picture will leave many feeling that they don't really know Hilde Coppi or what she stood for.

RED PATH.

Tunisian Lotfi Achour is best known as a playwright, with over 20 productions to his credit. However, since experimenting with film with the short, Ordure (2006), he has periodically revisited the medium, with the shorts Father (2015), Law of Lamb (2016), and Blind Spot (2022) being joined on his CV by his debut feature, Burning Hope (2016). His sophomore outing, Red Path, is a sobering realist drama that is based on the 2015 murder of 17 year-old Mabrouk Soltani in the aftermath of the Arab Spring-related revolution of 2011.

Cousins Nizar (Yassine Samouni) and Achraf (Ali Helali) live in a makeshift settlement on an arid Tunisian plain. They take their goats up Mount Mghila, even though the area is fenced off because of land mines and jihadist encampments. Nizar has been here before and is keen to show his younger cousin the spectacular view and share the sense that there is something better than their hardscrabble daily existence. As they enjoy their lunch after larking around, the boys are ambushed and Achraf is knocked unconscious, as Nizar is dragged away.

Waking to find his cousin lying motionless beside him, Achraf discovers that he's been decapitated and that one of the jihadists wants him to take the head back to Nizar's mother as a warning to those who don't keep their mouths shut. Terrified, Achraf puts the head in a blue knapsack and bolts down the mountain. One of the goats sets off a landmine and the teenager carries its kid in his jacket, as he knows it won't survive in the wild.

Picking his way down a slope, Achraf slips on some loose scree and the bag rolls away. Treading carefully, he retrieves it and makes his way home. Outside the compound, he sees some older boys playing football and they goad him into joining in. He doesn't play well, however, and gets chased away. Unable to think of how to break the news, he climbs a tree and leaves the bag nestling against a branch. The sun shines through the leaves, but a drop of blood from the bag lands on the lens to cast a sobering reddish light.

As he creeps home, Achraf bumps into Rahma (Wided Dabebi) and fibs that Nizar is still in the forest. He gives her the kid and she names it Tatouss. As he had heard Nizar use this name, Achraf blurts out that he's dead and tells her that his cousin had hoped to marry her. When she says she would never have considered him, Achraf tries to shush her, but she insists there's no point keeping quiet, as the dead know everything. Seeing that Achraf is distraught, Rahma gives him her lucky stone for protection.

Putting the head in the fridge, Achraf breaks the news to his Aunt Mbarka (Latifa Gafsi). She orders her older son, Mounir (Younes Naouar), to retrieve the body and he calls Mr Slah for advice. He also notifies the police, who claim that it's too late to come tonight, but will drop in the next day. Seeking comfort from his mother, Zina (Salha Nasraoui), Achraf tries to lay low. But Mbarka insists he describes what happens and he explains that he didn't see what befell Nazir because he had been knocked out. However, he does include a speech in which his cousin had expressed his undying love for his mother.

Bechir wonders if Nazir had been punished for snitching on the mujahideen to the government soldiers, as times are hard and the money would have been tempting. The others dismiss the theory. as Achraf lets loose Nazir's dogs, so that they can run into the hills and sit with his corpse. As he skulks in the shadows, he encounters Nazir's ghost, who declares that he has come to fetch his head from the fridge. As the spirit passes Achraf, their faces merge, with Nazir appearing in a bluish light and his cousin in flame red.

Mounir demands that Achraf leads the search party because he knows where he's going. When Zina protests that she doesn't want her son facing any more danger, her hot-headed nephew accuses her of betraying the family and the older menfolk remain silent. Slipping way, Achraf sits under a tree with Rahma, who is studying for an exam. She teases him about the folly of leaving school and he recites the lesson she is learning about animals and their habitats. They discuss Nizar and Rahma admits to not knowing whether he was informing for the army or the jihadists. He tells her that Nizar seemed to know his way around the mountain and had impressed on him that it seemed unfair to be kept away when there was grass and water for the goats.

It rains heavily and Achraf talks to Nizar again. He follows the group the next day, when Achraf and Mounir are joined by a couple of the older men. Despite being warned about the mines, Mounir steps on one and is told to keep still while one of the men slides a blade under his shoe and replaces the weight with a heavy stone. He remains short-fused, however, and berates Achraf when they reach the spot to find the body missing from the bloodstained ground. The others suggest Mounir cuts Achraf some slack because he has been traumatised, but he stomps off alone and finds the dogs guarding the cadaver, which has rolled down a slight incline.

He weeps over his brother before supervising the shrouding of his body and the construction of a bier from a blanket and some tree branches. As they are working, Mr Slah calls to admonish Mounir for venturing into forbidden territory, but he snaps back that they had no option as he had let them down by being too cowardly to help.

Meanwhile, Rahma heads for school on the back of a truck. Some of her friends find online footage of Nazir confessing to passing information to the troops and she jumps off the vehicle before witnessing the beheading and runs into the hills in considerable distress.

Trudging behind the bier, Achraf sees Nizar in a verdant clearing. He wanders over to him and is forgiven for leading the mujahideen to where they had been picnicking. Nizar tells him that he can always see him if he remembers the time they held their breath underwater and reminds him of the song they had used to sing about a Little Red Bird. At that moment, Rahma rushes up and informs Achraf that she has seen Nizar's video confession and that she had seen him watching at the side of the frame. She doesn't blame him for what happened, however, and opines that Nizar had told the jihadists what they had wanted to hear in an effort to protect his cousin.

Lying on the rocks, Rahma sings the bird song and reaches out to touch Achraf's hand. Just for a moment, they imagine they are carefree and swimming together. But her father, Moncef, spots her and is furious that she has risked her life to follow them into the danger zone. However, he is forced to calm down while Mounir takes a call from his wife, Hasna, who informs him that the press have photographed the head in the fridge. She also reveals that Slah has finally arrived and Mounir gives him an earful about manipulating the situation for his own ends and announces that they will not return until the media has gone.

As they wait, Achraf and Rahma sit with Nazir and reach out to touch a hand, as they think back on a happy celebration in their tiny community. At dusk, it starts to thunder and Mounir decides it's time to go home. With his father in Algeria, Zina is relieved to have Achraf back, but she has no intention of letting him stay in the Kasserine region with a target on his back. She arranges for him to return to school and stay with relatives in Gabès. Sitting under the tree with Rahma before he leaves, the resilient Achraf returns the stone and smiles sadly. She runs after the car, as it drives away and is disappointed when Achraf stops waving and turns away. As she walks slowly back into the compound, Rahma starts to cry.

Closing captions reveal that Mabrouk Soltani's 16 year-old brother, Khelifa, was beheaded 18 months after his sibling, while their mother had passed away in 2020 without knowing the full truth about what had happened to her sons and why.

Opting to plunge into the daily reality of two exuberant youths with limited understanding of the religious, social, and political forces at play around their remote, elements-blasted haven, Lotfi Achour and co-scenarist Natacha de Pontcharra leave non-Tunisian viewers to sink or swim when it comes to appreciating the complexities and nuances of this harrowing, fact-based drama. Accusations swirl, but conclusive evidence is thin on the ground, as Achour chooses to dwell less on the rights and wrongs of the affiliations and choices that drive the action than on the stark impact that they have on those whose sole preoccupation is survival.

The blood drip plays a crucial part in enabling Achour to shift from observing Achraf's ordeal to suggesting the psychological toll its taking on a 14 year-old who may or may not be an innocent caught up in matters he can only fathom in terms of the wildlife lesson that taught him how species learn to live within hostile terrain. If Rahma is right and the dead do know everything, then Nizar will have come to appreciate the circumstances that led to his brutal demise. Maybe he wasn't entirely blameless, hence there being nothing angry or vengeful about his spectral visitations. Indeed, he seems more melancholic at his life being cut short and at the realisation that dangerous games have devastating consequences.

Yet Achour betrays his cinematic inexperience in the ways in which he depicts these encounters, with the facial melding borrowed from Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966) feeling cumbersome. Nevertheless, the cumulative effect of cinematographer Wojciech Staron's widescreen close-ups and Aymen Laabidi's immersive sound design is affecting, as is the naturalistic acting of both Ali Helali and Wided Dabebi, whose rapport is not only beguiling, but also raises questions about the role of women in the future direction of countries within the Islamic world.

CHICKEN TOWN.

Although it may not be the most extensive, Richard Bracewell's filmography is certainly intriguing. Graduating from sketch television after having directed the Oxford Revue while studying at New College, he coaxed Susannah York, Anna Massey, and Siân Phillips into appearing in his debut feature, The Gigolos (2006). He then followed the unsettling thriller, Cuckoo (2009), with Bill (2015), a cod history of the lost years of one William Shakespeare. Returning to cinema after almost a decade, Bracewell combines comedy and crime in the affably daft farce, Chicken Town.

Ten months after Lee Matthews, Jr. (Ramy Ben Fredj) had crashed his car into a cemetery while high and called his dad to bail him out, fall guy Jayce (Ethaniel Davy) is released from prison. Selling his motorbike to a conspiracy theorising mechanic who deals drugs on the side (Laurence Rickard), Jayce pays a call on Lee, who has been turfed into a caravan on the outer edges of the Fenland estate owned by his father (Michael Dalton), who runs a large battery chicken farm.

A closet gay who has big dreams and no brains, Lee tells Jayce he can always rely on him. But his only true friend is Paula (Amelie Davies), a former schoolmate who lives in her nan's house next door to the nosy Kev Maddams (Graham Fellows). He's 67 and has never met his granddaughter in Australia. At the suggestion of daughter Megan (Amy Keen) during a face-time chat, Kev decides to get a new job so that he can meet new people after years of working for the Mattews meat empire. When he registers at the job centre, however, he is roundly mocked by two young employees because his mobile phone is so old fashioned.

Kev has an allotment and he tells Paula and Jayce that he has been looking after some plants for the former's nan (who has recently moved into a care home). Much to their astonishment, Jayce and Paula discover that Kev has been harvesting high-quality weed and storing it in tupperware tubs in his chest freezer. Realising they're sitting on a fortune, they try to find a way of offloading their crop and make contact at a roadside diner with Mr Green (Alistair Green). They get off on the wrong foot because Kev insists on being called `Clint' and pretends to have a gun. But Green turns out to be a nice man, many of whose clients use dope for medical reasons, and buys everything the inexperienced trio have got.

As they drive away, however, they are spotted by Vincenzo (Hugo Carter) and Sticks (Everett Gaskin), who sell drugs to school kids for Lee and who each has the hots for his stepmother, Mel (Gabriella Padula). She refuses to let Lee see his father and treats him like an idiot child because he has plans to erect a phone mast by the caravan. While Lee suffers from guilt at betraying Jayce, Vincenzo and Sticks pay Kev a call because they have noticed him unloading a new barbecue from the boot of his car and suspect he's the reason why their playground sales have dipped. Realising they're snooping, Kev plays dim and they set light to his recyling bin in revenge.

Sharing his first joint with Paula, Kev learns that she failed to speak up for Jayce when he was arrested and he throws her out. However, Jayce has heard the full story from the mechanic when he goes to buy back his bike and he vows to get even with the mate he's known since they were seven years old. However, he feels sorry for Lee, who is so unworldly and wants so desperately to please his father. When he receives a call to visit his sickbed, however, Lee discovers that Mel is pregnant and that he's about to be disinherited because his mother had slept with a farmhand.

Meanwhile, Vincenzo and Sticks have captured Jayce, Paula, and Kev and have bundled the latter into the boot of his stolen car. They plan to hand them over to Mel, who is their new boss. But they run into Lee at the chicken factory, who tussles with Vincenzo, while Sticks stands by with a piece of wood that vaguely resembles a gun. Humiliated, Vincenzo gets a petrol can out of the boot and prepares to self-immolate in imitation of a Buddhist monk he had seen online. However, Kev had taken a wee in the can while trapped in the boot and Vincenzo skulks off into the night.

As the film ends, Lee drives Kev to the airport because Jayce and Paula don't fancy becoming his new family. Lee adopts the name Clint and lands a job delivering chicken, when not playing war games with Paula at her nan's place. But Jayce hops on his bike and heads to pastures new, as there's nothing left for him in Holme Beach.

Plotwise, this is all over the shop. Indeed, at times, it feels as though Bracewell and co-scenarist Patrick Dalton were making things up as they went along. Yet they still manage to entertain and amuse, thanks in no small measure to the spirited turns of Ethaniel Davy, Lee (Amelie Davies, and Ramy Ben Fredj. But this would be a very different film without the comic stylings of the incomparable Graham Fellows, whose Little Chef showdown with Alistair Green's world's nicest drug dealer is the standout scene. That said, the best jokes come when Jayce and Paula spot a misengraved Argos carriage clock on Kev's mantelpiece and it takes a certain chutzpah to get away with a frozen lapstop screen gag twice in one scene.

Cinematographer Tansy Simpson might have been asked to do more with the distinctive Fenland landscape. But, while there are a couple of striking views, the visual side seems to matter less to Bracewell than the verbal. Bernard Hughes's jolly score underlines the odd punchline, but it's the sense of `all for oneness' that keeps this trundling along like one of those tractors that blocks a country lane until everyone sees the funny side after it's turned off.