The 67th BFI London Film Festival in partnership with American Express has announced that this year’s American Express Gala will be the European Premiere of the Nicholas Winton biopic, ONE LIFE, starring Anthony Hopkins and Johnny Flynn.
Directed by James Hawes and written by Lucinda Coxon & Nick Drake, based on the book, ‘If it’s not impossible… The life of Sir Nicholas Winton’ by Barbara Winton, the film also stars Lena Olin, Romola Garai, Alex Sharp, Marthe Keller, Jonathan Pryce and Helena Bonham Carter.
An incredible true story of bravery and heroism, ONE LIFE will receive its European Premiere on 12 October at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall.
Produced by See-Saw Films who developed the film alongside BBC Film, ONE LIFE was made with the support of BBC Film.
ONE LIFE tells the true story of Sir Nicholas ‘Nicky’ Winton, a young London broker played by Hopkins, who, in the months leading up to World War II, rescued 669 children from the Nazis. Nicky visited Prague in December 1938 and found families who had fled the rise of the Nazis in Germany and Austria, living in desperate conditions with little or no shelter and food, and under threat of Nazi invasion. He immediately realised it was a race against time. How many children could he and the team rescue before the borders closed?
Fifty years later, it’s 1988 and Nicky lives haunted by the fate of the children he wasn’t able to bring to safety in England; always blaming himself for not doing more. It’s not until a live BBC television show, ‘That’s Life’, surprises him by introducing him to some surviving children – now adults – that he finally begins to come to terms with the guilt and grief he had carried for five decades.
