The Pianist

“Music was his passion. Survival was his masterpiece.”

Władysław Szpilman (Adrien Brody), a Polish Jewish pianist, is playing a radio broadcast when the Germans bomb Warsaw in 1939. As the city walls close in around the ghetto, he moves through hiding places and narrow rooms, surviving on the help of strangers and his own quiet will. Polanski follows him through the rubble and silence until he sits alone at a piano, fingers still.