Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival: One Life (2023)

The Academy Award-winning costume designer behind Black Panther, Ruth Carter once noted she didn’t just start making superhero films. She’s been making them for decades, with a filmography that includes Malcolm X, Amistad and Selma. Carter’s right. There are two different kinds of superhero films: the corporate comic-book “blue beam” film and the kind of film One Life is — a story about one of the people that forever changed our world. The difference between the two is heroism.

Played by Anthony Hopkins and Johnny Flynn (2018’s Beast) in James Hawes’s new film, Nicholas Winton is the subject of the famous That’s Life!news broadcast where the entire live audience stands up and reveals that each and every one of them owes their life to Winton, who helped them escape Czechoslovakia as children on the eve of Nazi invasion. In total, Winton saved 669 children from slaughter in the Shoah. Today, more than 6,000 people owe the debt of life to Winton and his colleagues Martin Blake (Jonathan Pryce), Doreen Warriner (Romola Garai), and Trevor Chadwick (Alex Sharp) from the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia.

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