Filip

In its bold focus on romantic pleasures and quality of life amid barbarity, Filip breaks every film cliché about the Nazi era and the Holocaust. In a wartime Frankfurt where horrors and trauma don't exclude the ecstasies and intrigues of the young, Filip, a waiter at the city's top hotel, is a clandestine Jewish refugee from the Warsaw Ghetto whose life depends on the ruse that he is French.

For foreign workers in race-mad Germany, fraternizing with Aryan women is punishable by death—and confident, seductive Filip violates this prohibition repeatedly, passionately, and brazenly. Expressive cinematography and period-perfect costumes offer a bracing contrast with an unexpectedly sharp character study of a man caught between the quest for survival and the hunger for revenge.