History has shown us leaders with widely varying styles of leadership. Just look at Hitler and our own Keir Starmer. One cajoled a disenchanted people to vote him into power by playing on their disenchantment before plunging his people into turmoil, imprisoning any who spoke out against him….. whilst the other was Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer was Dietrich Bonhoeffer (played here by Jonas Dassler) a pastor, spy and would be assassin of Hitler and the film follows him in flashback taking in his childhood days from a wealthy background, losing his brother in World War One, witnessing racism first hand in New York where he attended his seminary to eventually becoming a political prisoner at Buchenwald concentration camp where he writes in his bible recounting how he had ended up there.
Bonhoeffer was a devout Lutheran pastor who soon came to realize the threat that Hitler posed to everyone. Hardly surprising when the moustachioed one starting replacing church crucifixes with swastika’s, rewrote the Bible with his own version that portrayed Jesus as Aryan and had an Old Testament that added an extra two commandments to the original ten. Appalled at it all Bonhoeffer led his church in a stance against the state rejecting the Fuehrer’s false doctrines and soon the pastor would soon turn intended assassin. ‘Faith without action is no faith at all’ he tells his co-conspirators. Publicly calling out Hitler in his sermons he even sneaks over to Britain to get support from ministers there too asking them to smuggle explosives.
Written and directed by Todd Komarnicki, who has previously scripted Ton Hanks starrer ‘Sully’, for Clint Eastwood and also produced the Christmas favourite, ‘Elf’, this is an undoubtedly sincere in its appraisal into the importance of how overlooked a figure Bonhoeffer was but this alternates between being occasionally stirring stuff with often dry telling of his story.
related feature : How do you get priests to have a shoot out in a church? Director Barnaby Thompson talks about his film, ‘Pixie’
related feature : Hugh Grant as you’ve never seen him before in, ‘Heretic’
We chatted with writer-director Todd Komarnicki about the making of the film…..
At the London premiere the cast & crew talk about the making of the film……
Here’s the Bonhoeffer Pastor Spy Assassin trailer……..
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