Morton and Wilkin are teamed up to find and capture the leader of the Irgun, Avraham Stern (Aury Alby), with an eye toward cutting off the head of this increasingly violent and fast-growing terrorist group. The script by Winterbottom, Laurence Coriat and Paul Viragh is at its best in some ways when illustrating the perspectives of the disparate factions struggling for control at the time - from Haganah, the paramilitary Zionist force to which Shoshana belongs, to the Irgun, a hard-core Zionist organization dedicated to intimidating Arabs out of the territory through bombing and assassinations.Ĭaught in the middle of this muddle are the British police and military, represented here by governmental representative Robert Chambers (Ian Hart), anti-terrorism officer Geoffry Morton (Harry Melling, reliably excellent) and police officer Tom Wilkin (Douglas Booth), fresh off the boat from the British Home Counties, who soon becomes lovers with Shoshana. At the time, Palestine was still under the colonial rule of the British, who were dithering between allowing the territory to secede as two states, or one Jewish state, or just carry on and keep ruling.Īs more and more Jews start settling in the region, many fleeing the rise of Nazism in Europe, tensions mount between the Arabs and the Zionist settlers. The film gives her the job, assisted by reams of subtitled text and snippets from vintage newsreels, of laying out via voiceover the historical political context in the 1930s.
Screenwriters: Michael Winterbottom, Laurence Coriat, Paul Viragh Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Special Presentations)Ĭast: Irina Starshenbaum, Harry Melling, Douglas Booth, Gal Mizrav, Ian Hart, Aury Alby, Ofer Seker, Liudmyla Vasylieva You can trace this theme back to his third feature Welcome to Sarajevo (1997), through In This World (2002) and up to the recent Eleven Days in May(co-directed by Mohammed Sawwaf), which documented the bombing of Palestinians in Gaza in 2021 and the children who were killed in the attack. That said, one of his most consistent, go-to genres - apart from comedy-dramas starring Steve Coogan - has been dramatized true stories, especially ones about characters trying to navigate or escape conflict zones. It sometimes seems as if prolific British director Michael Winterbottom has had a go at just about every major type of film apart from light opera, shark attack stories and steampunk animé.
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