Oliver Hirschbiegel

Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall tells the last days of the Second World War through the eyes of Hitler's private secretary Traudl Junge, in a film running over two and a half hours. Bruno Ganz plays Hitler and the sources find the performance extraordinary: a man shuffling through the rooms of the bunker, swinging from a dark submission of mood into fits of unreal optimism. The historian Ian Kershaw wrote that Ganz caught Hitler's voice almost perfectly and that the speech was chillingly real. One scene later became a joke on the internet, but the courage underneath it is plain. Before that he had made The Experiment. His other work here includes Five Minutes of Heaven and A Very Ordinary Jew.