Faith-based films have come a long way since the days when Southern Baptist evangelist Estus W. Pirkle was churning out low budget “soul winners” and distributing them to local Protestant churches to show in their basements. Over the past decade or so, Christian films have achieved a level of professionalism on par with most modestly budgeted Hollywood productions, even managing to occasionally do relatively well at the box office.
Yet, many such efforts have still been missing that little extra something that might allow them to connect to a wider audience outside of religious circles. Not so with writer/director Anthony D’Ambrosio’s new movie exploring the last days of St. Maximilian Kolbe.
Triumph of the Heart is an entirely emotionally engaging film on a level not confined to just the faithful.
The events leading up to Kolbe’s imprisonment in the concentration camp at Auschwitz, as well as the incident in which the priest volunteered to take the place of a fellow prisoner sentenced to death by starvation, are well known. However, when it comes to the period of time between when Kolbe and nine other men were ushered into an underground bunker and two weeks later when the few remaining survivors were administered lethal injections, the details are sketchy at best.
A single eyewitness, one of the camp’s janitors, reports hearing Kolbe leading the prisoners in prayer and singing, something that had never happened before, but that’s about it.
This lack of specific details allows D’Ambrosio copious dramatic license to work with. Since the historical records do not provide the names of the nine men who died alongside Kolbe, D’Ambrosio is given free rein to create their characters from whole cloth, portraying them as a cross-cultural swath of the various classes to be found in Poland during World War II.
There’s a die-hard patriot, a common working man unwillingly caught up in the conflict, a communist revolutionary, an elderly Jew, an atheistic nihilist, and so on. Yet, the characters never come across as mere stereotypes. The mostly European actors who make up the cast manage to instill each of the men with distinctive personalities and, ultimately, make you care for them.
The quality of the acting is fortunate given the limited action in the movie. There are a handful of flashbacks to the prisoners’ former lives and a few scenes inside the home of the German officer overseeing the torture, but for the most part, the movie is confined to the solitary cell Kolbe and his fellow inmates are locked within. In essence, the film is akin to a one-room play along the lines of 12 Angry Men. However, where that work used its location to heighten tension and provide a sense of claustrophobia, Triumph of the Heart effectively utilizes its setting to emphasize the hopelessness of the prisoners’ situation. At least that’s what their captors want them to feel.
We see things differently
One of the reasons Christianity has been impossible for its enemies to extinguish is that the religion has different definitions for words like hope and victory than does the secular world. Jesus taught us that hope is the virtue by which we put our trust in God’s promise of heaven and eternal life, and victory is the triumph over death and evil which that hope in Christ brings. These biblical definitions, embodied most fully in the crucifixion, transcend worldly interpretations which usually view hope and victory as mere optimism and worldly success. And this becomes one of the central themes in Triumph of the Heart, as Kolbe does his best to communicate this truth to a group of men who know they will never be allowed to leave the starvation bunker alive.
To help hammer the ideas of Christian hope and victory home, D’Ambrosio again uses the lack of documented facts to his advantage. Not much is really known of the German officer portrayed in the movie other than he was a supervisor at Auschwitz while Kolbe was imprisoned there and, soon after the priest’s execution, was demoted for reasons unstated and died in disgrace. D’Ambrosio assigns to this outcome the possibility that the officer was ordered by his superiors to crush the spirit of Kolbe and his cellmates once it became clear they were not going to die begging and screaming for their lives. The choice infuses the narrative with a bit of conflict ala The Bridge on the River Kwai.
That the 10 men ultimately managed to hold onto true hope despite impending death is a matter of record, but how they managed to do so is what makes up most of the movie’s speculations. It would be doing the film a disservice to reveal all that happens inside the bunker. Suffice to say, how the various men, including Kolbe himself, work through their individual doubts, fears, anger, and physical suffering is what ultimately gives the movie its emotional heft. And again, that is what distinguishes Triumph of the Heart from many other faith-based films out there. It moves beyond being just a technically competent movie and becomes a story you actually feel.
Triumph of the Heart opens in theaters on September 12.
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Read Aleteia's interview from last year with writer/director Anthony D’Ambrosio below:
