Oliver Hirschbiegel, who made a big splash a decade ago with Downfall, revisits German history with 13 Minutes, written by the father-daughter team of Fred Breinersdorfer (Sophie Scholl), and Leonie-Claire Breinersdorfer.
Christian Friedel (The White Ribbon) plays Johann Georg Elser, a simple craftsman from the countryside, who loved life, love, music and freedom, and was turned into a resistance fighter by totalitarian Nazism.
The bomb that Elser had personally assembled would have torn apart Hitler and his henchmen.
The film centers on Elser’s failed bomb attack on Hitler on November 8, 1939 in the Munich Buergerbraukeller, where the Nazi dictator left the scene only 13 minutes before the explosion.
Captured as he fled, Elser was interrogated by the head of the Criminal Police, Arthur Nebe (Burghart Klaussner) and the leader of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller (Johann von Bülow), trying to unearth his accomplices.
Though Elser acted all on his own, his captors refused to believe that an ordinary man had very nearly taken out the “Führer.”
Goebbel’s propaganda machinery made sure that the world knew that Elser is just a puppet on the string led by the English. Nebe and Müller try to make Elser give over his instigators. But they never do.
Nebe, who is quite impressed with Elser’s steadfastness, remarks to Müller: “You can’t get more out of him than the truth.” Müller disagrees: “We decide what the truth is!”
When they realize that Elser will not name any accessories, he is conveyed, via Sachsenhausen, to the concentration camp Dachau. While there, in March 1945, Elser is murdered by a shot to the neck, ordered by Hitler himself.
His killing occurred shortly before the end of WWII on April 9, 1945, and 20 days before the liberation of the concentration camp by the US Army.
The film has attracted strong interest from U.S. buyers.
The story follows Elser from his early years in the Swabian Alps to his last days at the Dachau concentration camp, where he was killed shortly before the end of the war.
Studiocanal previously nabbed all-rights deals on the film for U.K. and Ireland, and now has taken the rights for Australia and New Zealand.
Hirschbiegel previously directed Oscar-nominated pic “Downfall,” the Liam Neeson starrer “Five Minutes of Heaven,” which won a directing prize at Sundance, and Naomi Watts biopic starrer “Diana.”
“13 Minutes” stars Christian Friedel (“The White Ribbon”), Katharina Schuettler (“Generation War”) and Burghart Klaussner (“The White Ribbon”).
