Louise Archambault shot her Holocaust drama -- set for a world premiere at TIFF -- in Poland as Ukrainian refugees fled the current Russian invasion and as U.S. President Joe Biden marked the war’s one-year anniversary in Warsaw.
And visiting Warsaw’s main train station, which at the time was a major pit stop for millions of Ukrainian refugees, brought home the horrors of the Russian invasion. “It was mostly women and children, needing food and clothing and a place just to rest. I thought, that’s the war, and it’s happening next to my hotel. I’m going to sleep in a bed in a hotel room and they don’t have any homes and maybe they lost someone, or their husband is at war,” she recalled.
All of which underlined for Archambault the courage of her film’s heroine, Irena Gut, a Polish nurse played by Sophie Nelisse who sheltered a dozen Jewish men and women from persecution and murder under the nose of a Nazi commandant while running his home as a housekeeper and then being forced to become his mistress.
“I’m going to possibly save some Jews. Maybe I’m going to die, I don’t care, I have to do something, otherwise I feel helpless,” the director said of Gut’s real-life motivation. Resolved to protect Polish factory workers under her supervision and facing certain death after imminent arrest, Gut chose the safest place she knew, the basement of the German commandant’s house in which she lived.
Over two years, she hid the Jews until the end of the German occupation, concealing them amid Nazi parties in the home, a blackmail scheme that led to Irena’s romantic involvement, and even the birth of a child.
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