Roland Joffé: The Director Who Made Moral Courage Cinematic

From The Killing Fields and The Mission to the extraordinary true story of Irena Sendler, two-time Academy Award-nominated director Roland Joffé has built a remarkable career exploring history through the people forced to make impossible choices within it. Now, with Irena’s Children, the story of the Polish resistance network that helped rescue Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto, Joffé returns to territory that has defined some of his most celebrated work: courage, conscience, sacrifice and the extraordinary power of individuals to resist overwhelming evil.

There are filmmakers who recreate history, and there are filmmakers who seem compelled to enter its most difficult moments and ask what they reveal about human nature. Roland Joffé, the British-French director whose films include The Killing Fields, The Mission, Fat Man and Little Boy, City of Joy and Vatel, belongs firmly in the latter category. His greatest films are not conventional history lessons dressed in beautiful cinematography; they are intimate examinations of people whose private choices unfold against events so enormous that they threaten to overwhelm them.

That sensibility makes Joffé's connection to Irena Sendler particularly compelling. The Polish social worker and resistance activist risked her life as part of the clandestine effort to rescue Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust. Joffé is attached to direct Irena’s Children, a feature film centered on Sendler and the extraordinary network of people who risked everything to save children targeted for annihilation. For anyone familiar with his finest work, the connection between filmmaker and subject feels remarkably natural.