13 Minutes

A film set in Germany. 8 November 1939. There is a ceremony at a beer hall in Munich. Hitler speaks there every year. A man has placed a bomb in a pillar. A timing mechanism is set. The bomb goes off. Eight people die. But Hitler is not there. He cut his speech short and left the hall thirteen minutes earlier. Georg Elser is caught at the border the same night. From there the film moves between interrogation and the past. The interrogation is hard. Elser is beaten and asked who he was working for. His answer is the same: nobody. Nobody believes it. An organisation is being looked for. The sections in the past describe who Elser was. He is a carpenter. He lives in a small town, knows how to make clocks, and plays the accordion. He has little to do with politics. He joined a union and left it. He is having an affair. Elsa is married and her husband treats her badly. The regime settles into the town by degrees. The narrative gives this in small separate scenes: a flag, a salute, a neighbour's denunciation, a shop closed. Elser sees them. What the narrative is interested in is not an assassination but one man: its idea is that he decided on his own, tied to no organisation, and that nobody could accept it. The section on building the bomb is detailed. Elser got into the hall at night for months and hollowed out the pillar. The two men conducting the interrogation are real people. What became of him is given as text at the end. Christian Friedel plays the part quietly. Oliver Hirschbiegel directed. Christian Friedel, Katharina Schüttler, Burghart Klaußner and Johann von Bülow are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone interested in prewar German history and films based on real events. Who it is not for: anyone looking for structure; the flashbacks are frequent and the town sections break the tempo.