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26 Jun 25
Fresh Takes is Picturehouse's space for the next generation of film lovers to share their thoughts on the latest films coming to our screens.
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This time, our Fresh Takes writers share their thoughts on a powerful true story of love during wartime: Andreas Dresen's From Hilde, With Love is a portrait of Hilde and Hans, two young members of Nazi-resistance group the Red Orchestra, whose romance plays out against the backdrop of a country torn by conflict.
From Hilde, With Love doesn't rely on grand spectacle or heavy-handed drama to make its point. Instead, it quietly immerses us in the final months of resistance fighter Hilde Coppi's life, finding strength in understatement and human detail.
Set against the backdrop of Nazi-era Berlin, the film explores themes of defiance, love, and sacrifice through a restrained yet emotionally resonant lens. Liv Lisa Fries is magnetic as Hilde, her performance deeply felt but never showy. With minimal dialogue and little music, she carries the film with a stillness that makes every glance, every silence, feel meaningful. Andreas Dresen's direction is intimate and observational. Rather than focusing on political ideology, he foregrounds the everyday courage of someone who simply could not look away. The muted visuals, natural sounds, and sparse production design all contribute to a haunting atmosphere that lingers long after the credits roll.
Some may find the film's subtlety frustrating, its resistance narrative deliberately sidesteps hero worship or ideological statements. But that's also what makes it powerful. From Hilde, With Love isn't a war epic; it's a human story about quiet conviction and love in impossible times.
If you're looking for a film that prompts introspection rather than offering easy answers, this one's worth your time. It's a portrait of resistance not through big moments, but through the weight of small, intimate ones.
"Because I loved my husband." From Hilde, With Love is a stark, unflinching portrayal of love and resistance under fascism, set in 1940s Berlin. Centered on Hilde and Hans, lovers caught in totalitarian repression, the film draws from the true story of the Red Orchestra resistance network. It rejects heroic mythmaking in its entirety, showing quiet defiance as intimate, ordinary, and ultimately doomed.
The film's power lies in restraint. There are no public acts of defiance or moral victories, only slow, suffocating collapse. Here, resistance appears cautious and tragically ineffectual. The film focuses on the fragile interior life of its protagonists with striking candour. Their romantic and sexual intimacy is rendered with haunting immediacy, exposing vulnerability, memory, and the way in which trauma metabolizes through the body. For Hilde, desire becomes indistinguishable from survival; the erotic here is political.
In my experience, From Hilde, With Love is distinguished by its cinematography: a grainy, almost archival black-and-white palette, evoking mid-century German cinema and documentary realism. Natural light bleeds into sterile interiors as shadows stretch across skin and paper with equal weight. Paired with Kate Bush's animated short Little Shrew (Snowflake), a black-and-white allegory of a tiny shrew navigating war, the double feature deepens this meditation on survival as erasure. Bush's reworking of her song 'Snowflake' layers fragility with defiance, embodying the displaced and forgotten.
Together, both works refuse sentimentality, leaving heavy, unresolved silence, a devastating proximity to disappearance, forgotten courage, and love without legacy.
Ben is an MPhil student studying Modern European History at the University of Cambridge, passionate about experimental and arthouse movies, translating historical texts/events into visual mediums, and working with film cameras. He is a particularly big fan of David Lynch and Jan Švankmajer!
Ben says...
Naturally, From Hilde, With Love is a film with few moments of reprieve, cycling between two narratives of Hilde's life both before and after her imprisonment. However, it is also a film with a strong love story at its core, with the director giving this human narrative its rightful focus and relegating Nazism to the background. This choice was one that I found refreshing; the swastika is rarely visible and Hitler's photograph can only be seen in the background of one scene.
Moreover, of the few Nazis that are shown, these are not portrayed as exaggerated supervillains, but are instead shown as working through cold bureaucracy. The 'banality of evil' repeatedly came to mind, with the film effectively showing how Nazi atrocity was committed by ordinary people following 'policy'. We are often used to seeing this in the context of the Holocaust in general, but rarely does a film show its impact on a single person.
Through this, the tragedy of Hilde feels more impactful, creating a far stronger emotional connection between myself and her than I had ever expected. Although some may feel that the dual narrative might slow the pacing, these always came at the right time when the prison got too oppressive. We must remember this is a true story – I believe the memory of those involved have been done a great service. I did not know Hilde before, but I am glad I know her now.
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