Project Detail

The Volunteer

Synopsis

Based on Jack Fairweather's Costa Book of the Year prize-winning biography of Witold Pilecki. Pilecki was a covert operative who volunteered to be captured and taken to deadly new Nazi detention centre, Auschwitz, in order to infiltrate the camp, organise a resistance from within, gather evidence of the atrocities being committed against thousands of European Jews, and ultimately attack the Nazi forces from where they’d least expect. However, Pilecki’s incredible and heroic story would later be wiped from the annals of history by Poland’s communist government and the man himself branded a traitor and enemy of the state.
Fairweather’s account pieces together first-hand accounts from survivors, access to unpublished diaries and newly released archival documents.

Details

Year: 2021
Type of film: Features
Director
Producer: Juliette Howell, Tessa Ross
Screenwriter: Jack Fairweather (book)

Genre

Drama

Production Status

Pre-production

Production Company

US, UK co-production

A House Productions (UK) production with support from Access Entertainment (US)

House Productions

14A Clerkenwell Green
London
EC1R 0DP

Visit Website

Page updates

This page was last updated on 12th May 2025. Please let us know if we need to make any amendments or request edit access by clicking below.

Suggest amendments

George Best was one of the greatest footballers who ever lived. But he was so much more than that. Although the football pitch was his arena, Best was essentially a pop star - young, stylish, strikingly beautiful, possessed of a creative confidence that bordered on arrogance, and worshipped by young men and women alike. Like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.<br /> This film is simultaneously a celebration of a genius and an exploration of the demons that brought him down. We all know how these biopics traditionally work: in this case a talented but innocent young man from the backstreets of a divided but still pre-Troubles Belfast, becomes a star. But his time at the top is agonizingly short: a family history of alcoholism doesn’t help, in those pre-drug Sixties everyone wanted to buy him a drink, and before he was thirty, he was a washed up drunk. <br /> But we’re taking the Benjamin Button approach here. No-one wants to go out on a downer, with the end card telling us how many hundreds of thousands lined the streets of his home town to bid him farewell, along with the millions watching on live television.

Northern Irish Sport Drama

UKGSF 2024 13.08.24

Director:

Year: 2026