A Woman in Berlin

April 1945, Berlin. The Red Army enters the city. An unnamed woman journalist writes the weeks in a shelter and a wrecked apartment block into a notebook. Almost everyone left in the street is a woman, and mass rape becomes routine. She makes a decision: rather than stay open to random assault, put herself under the protection of a senior officer. The choice draws her into a strange, unnamed relationship with a major called Andrej. Max Färberböck directs. Nina Hoss plays the woman and Yevgeni Sidikhin plays Andrej. The source is a real diary. A Woman in Berlin was first published in the fifties and was met with anger in Germany, where it was said to make German women look without honour, and the author refused to allow a reprint while she lived. When it was republished in 2003 it became a bestseller, and it emerged then that the author was the journalist Marta Hillers. The hardest thing about the film is its tone. The subject is a war crime and the telling does not shout; the woman's voice is cold, observing, at times sardonic. That comes from the language of the diary. Nina Hoss's performance carries it, holding without a break the distance the character builds in order to survive. Who it is for: viewers who want the end of the Second World War told from the civilian and female side. Who it is not for: the subject is very heavy, the scenes are explicit, and the film pulls the Andrej relationship further towards romance than it should.