Why the director of Bonhoeffer is fed up with refuting lies

Contrary to what its detractors have claimed, Angel Studios’ new film Bonhoeffer is not trying to endorse a modern political agenda. That’s according to the film’s director Todd Komarnicki, who says he’s grown frustrated at how critics are linking this film with “the opposite of what it’s trying to do.”

My top ten all-time favourite movies include two that are owed to the creative genius that is Todd Komarnicki. He was the brilliant producer of that most beloved Christmas comedy, Elf, about a baby who accidentally crawls into Santa’s sack, ends up at the North Pole, and is adopted and raised - as an elf. He also wrote the screenplay for Sully: Miracle on The Hudson, about a pilot, played by the inimitable Tom Hanks, who landed a passenger airliner in the Hudson river in 2009, thus averting a fatal crash. Now Komarnicki has directed a brand-new film called Bonhoeffer, based on the life of a young German Christian who died 80 years ago this year.  

A real depiction

Dietrich Bonhoeffer has been a hero of mine for a long time, but recently with right-wing politics on the rise across Europe and America, I have been drawn back to his attempts to speak out as the Nazis infiltrated the church claiming that God was on their side. Bonhoeffer also spoke up against the increasing populism and racism that paved the way for Hitler’s tyranny.

He is most well-known for his calling to the church to the costly discipleship that Jesus modelled, but he also called the church to be a community of resistance against toxic ideology, compromise and injustice. It was a stance that cost him his reputation, his freedom, and his life. He was executed in Buchenwald concentration camp on April 9th 1945, just three weeks before the end of the war.