The Zookeeper's Wife

The Zookeeper's Wife (2017) is a wartime drama you can watch online on iFILM. Directed by Niki Caro, it stars Jessica Chastain as Antonina Zabinski, whose family turned the Warsaw Zoo into a hiding place during the German occupation.

When bombs fell on the Polish capital in the autumn of 1939, most of the animals were killed or shipped away. Antonina and her husband Jan found a new use for the emptied enclosures and cellars: right under the soldiers' boots, they smuggled people out of the ghetto and kept them alive underground. Over the war years more than three hundred passed through the hidden compartments beneath the cages. The danger sharpens when an old colleague, zoologist Lutz Heck, now works for the Reich and grows fixated on Antonina. Daniel Brühl plays him.

The film draws on Diane Ackerman's book, which pieced the Zabinskis' story together from Antonina's own diaries. It is a quiet portrait of resistance, where rescue hides behind the ordinary chores of running a zoo. Stream The Zookeeper's Wife (2017) online on iFILM.