![]() The lead judge asks for a handwriting sample, ashamed, she avoids this test by testifying she wrote the report. Hanna denies this, insisting that all the guards present agreed on the contents of the report. ![]() Hanna's co-defendants then all lie that she was in charge, and that she wrote the report. Hanna admitted it was a lie, they had not opened the doors so the prisoners could not escape. The guards' report said they did not know about it until morning. When questioned on the church fire, no one explained why they had not unlocked the doors. Hanna, unlike her co-defendants, admits that Auschwitz was an extermination camp and that she and the others chose 10 women for each month's Selektion. Rose testifies that when the church caught fire from a bombing raid, as the guards locked the doors, all but her and Ilana died. Ilana testifies that Hanna had women from the camp read to her in the evenings. Ilana Mather and her mother Rose give the key evidence. Michael is horrified to see that Hanna is one of the defendants. In 1966, a Heidelberg University Law School student, Michael observes a trial (similar to the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials) of several former SS guards accused of letting 300 Jewish women and children perish in a burning church during the death march near Kraków, Poland. When Michael finds her apartment vacant he is devastated.Īgain in 1995, Michael is reserved around women, divorced, and estranged from his daughter. Toward the end of summer, Hanna is promoted to the tram's head offices, they argue, she sends him away, packs her things and leaves. On a bicycle trip, they visit a church with a choir and Hanna is emotional. She asks him to read to her from his school books. Michael visits Hanna with flowers once he is better, and they proceed to have a summer affair. Vomiting beside an apartment building, tram conductor Hanna Schmitz, 36, finds him, cleans him up and helps him home. Michael, 15, feels sick, getting off the tram to walk in the rain. In 1995 Berlin, Michael Berg watches a train pass, flashing back to a tram ride from 1958. The film was nominated for several other major awards, including the Academy Award for Best Picture. Īlthough it received mixed reviews, Winslet and Kross, who plays the young Michael, received acclaim for their performances Winslet won a number of awards for her role, including the Academy Award for Best Actress. Some historians criticised the film for making Schmitz an object of the audience's sympathy and accused the filmmakers of Holocaust revisionism. ![]() Michael realizes that Hanna is keeping a personal secret she believes is worse than her Nazi past – a secret which, if revealed, could help her at the trial. She disappears only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a guard at a Nazi concentration camp. The film tells the story of Michael Berg, a German lawyer who, as a 15-year-old in 1958, has a sexual relationship with an older woman, Hanna Schmitz. Production began in Germany in September 2007, and the film opened in limited release on December 10, 2008. It was the last film for producers Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack, both of whom died prior to its release. It stars Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, and David Kross. The Reader is a 2008 romantic drama film directed by Stephen Daldry and written by David Hare, based on the 1995 German novel of the same name by Bernhard Schlink.
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