Blind at Heart

Post-screening discussion with actress Mala Emde at both screenings.

A magnetic Mala Emde portrays Hélène, an aspiring doctor who tries to hide her Jewish identity after arriving in Weimar-era Berlin as a young woman. Over the subsequent decades, Hélène finds her career ambitions and romantic expectations transformed as she begins to witness the frightening rise of Nazism, ultimately leading her to drastic decisions that will forever change her sense of self and make her question the very idea of personal independence. With an assured sense of dramatic motion, Barbara Albert (director of the invigorating Free Radicals, an NYFF41 Main Slate selection) adapts Julia Franck’s internationally renowned, German Book Prize–winning novel Die Mittagsfrau (The Blindness of the Heart) into an exacting moral tale about the difficult choices people make during times of tumult, spanning the late 1920s to the darkest days of World War II. Note: some images may be disturbing; contains a depiction of sexual assault.