Storm

Having made a number of successful and distinctive features in Germany (Crazy, Distant Lights, Requiem), director Hans-Christian Schmid moves into English-language filmmaking with a legal drama about personal and political integrity. Hannah Maynard (Kerry Fox), a prosecutor at the UN International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, is given an apparently cast-iron case against a former Yugoslav National Army commander accused of ethnic cleansing. When the chief witness for the prosecution proves unreliable, Maynard travels to Bosnia with only a week’s grace to try and rebuild a case. In the course of her investigations she stumbles across further atrocities, consequently placing herself under threat from the war profiteers now running the Balkans. She persuades a reluctant young woman, Mira (Anamaria Marinca), to testify, but is shocked to find that the judicial process she has believed in and passionately supported throughout her career is itself suspect. Her loyalty towards her witness is at odds with her professional role, and like Mira, she has to make a choice between silence and speaking out. While the higher production values of Storm mark it as something of a shift from Schmid’s earlier films, it shares with them his interest in the pursuit of individual freedom and being true to one’s self. —BFI