#19: The Pianist
Year: 2002
The Pianist is a Holocaust film that follows the experiences of well-established Jewish Polish pianist Władysław Szpilman slightly before and during the outbreak of the war. After being forced into the Warsaw Ghetto, a small corner of the city that house 138,000 Jewish residents, Szpilman somehow managed to escape.
He lived out the remainder of the war in an abandoned building with the help of an unlikely friend, a German officer whose real name was Wilm Hosenfeld. With the help of Szpilman’s memoir and the personal recounts of the director, who was a survivor, Roman Polanski, The Pianist draws accurate conclusions from the period between 1939 and 1945.