Leading Israeli actress Shira Haas will appear in a new film, Triumph of the Will, according to a report in Variety.
The entertainment industry publication described the film as “a sprawling period movie set during World War II, written and directed by American filmmaker Gabriel Nussbaum.”
Haas was the breakout star of the Israeli series Shtisel about the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community and was nominated for an Emmy and a Golden Globe for her performance in another drama series about haredi Jews, Unorthodox on Netflix.
She also appeared in the latest Captain America movie, Captain America: Brave New World, last year, opposite Harrison Ford.
Among her other achievements, Haas won the 2020 Best Actress Award in the International Narrative category at the Tribeca Film Festival for the Israeli film, Asia.
In Triumph of the Will, Haas portrays a woman who leaves her husband in Amsterdam in 1937 with her daughter and moves to Berlin, where she gets involved with a rabbi trying to get Jews out of the country.
David Kaplan, the film’s producer, who also made the movie Josephine, which won the Audience Award and the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival last month, described Triumph of the Will’s storyline to Variety.
“This good man is trying to help people get out of Berlin, but he is perhaps more focused on doing good work than he is on saving himself or his new family,” Kaplan told the publication. “It starts as a romantic drama about somebody trying to find happiness, have the life they want, even if it’s slightly irrational.”
Drama centered around parental dilemma
He said much of the drama centered around the dilemma of what the couple should do with Haas’s character’s four-year-old child, who cannot flee with her mother and stepfather because she would need her father’s permission to leave.
“They have to decide whether or not they leave her behind in Berlin and survive themselves, and try and have her sent to America after they get there, or whether they’re all going to stay behind and die.”
The movie, set in Amsterdam, Berlin, Lisbon, and Oklahoma, was filmed entirely in New York.
Haas will also appear opposite Jeremy Strong in the upcoming Netflix series The Boys from Brazil, an adaptation of the Ira Levin novel, which was made into a 1978 movie starring Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier.