Sophie's Choice

In postwar Brooklyn a young aspiring writer becomes entangled with Sophie, a Polish Catholic survivor of Auschwitz, and her volatile American lover Nathan. As the friendship deepens, the film reveals through flashback the choice forced on Sophie at the camp gates, a decision no person should have to make.

The film traces how an unbearable act of survival returns as guilt, self-destruction and a repetition that pulls others into its orbit. It gives a clinician a portrait of trauma that cannot be metabolised and a bond built on its reenactment. Meryl Streep won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1983, and the film is based on the novel Sophie's Choice by William Styron.