A Woman in Berlin

A Woman in Berlin (2008) — watch online on iFILM: a German war drama directed by Max Färberböck, starring Nina Hoss. Based on an anonymous diary started on the twentieth of April, 1945, in a Berlin bomb shelter, as Soviet forces were closing in on the city.

The unnamed protagonist is a self-possessed journalist who has seen the world. Then the city falls. For her and hundreds of thousands of other Berlin women, the first weeks of defeat become a series of assaults by conquering soldiers. She makes a calculated decision — seek out a Soviet officer willing to offer protection — and keeps writing it all down. Hoss plays her with a stark composure that never tips into sentiment: this is survival as an act of will, not a story of redemption.

The diary circulated anonymously in the 1950s, scandalized West German readers, and was republished in 2003 after the author was identified posthumously as journalist Marta Hillers. Färberböck's adaptation doesn't soften the record. Watch A Woman in Berlin (2008) online on iFILM.