“He who saves one life saves the world,” goes the saying. This film pays tribute to a man who saved 669 lives. A towering achievement by any measure.

Nicholas Winton, who died in 2015 aged 106, was an English stockbroker of German-Jewish heritage who worked in 1938 to arrange the transportation of Jewish children from Nazi-threatened Prague to safety in England. Without his efforts, most if not all would have died of starvation, disease or in a Nazi concentration camp.

Anthony Hopkins in One Life

Winton’s humanitarian exploits were on a similar scale to those of Oskar Schindler (immortalised in Stephen Spielberg’s harrowing Schindler’s List) yet were only known to a few until, in 1988, he was invited onto the BBC TV program That’s Life!, which reunited him with some of those children, now parents and grandparents themselves.

Further recognition of Winton’s mission followed (in part generated by the Czech-born newspaper mogul Robert Maxwell) and in 2003, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for “services to humanity”.

In this film adapted from the book written by his daughter Barbara Winton, we are shuttled backwards and forwards across 50 years, between Winton’s home...