A new film focusing on the last 14 days of St. Maximilian Kolbe’s life is aiming to capture the attention of millennials and Gen Z.

Scheduled to be released in September, Triumph of the Heart has a young director and crew, some of whom have worked on productions such as The Chosen and The Hunger Games. And for producer, writer and director Anthony D’Ambrosio, the connection to the Polish saint who died by lethal injection of carbolic acid at Auschwitz in 1941 is deeply personal.

D’Ambrosio told The Catholic Register that as a “warm-blooded Italian” he had not felt drawn to the “stern-faced” Franciscan friar until a time of personal crisis. Having left seminary and lost his faith, D’Ambrosio found his troubles multiplied by ill health. Suffering from insomnia, depression and mood issues that accompanied a mold infection, D’Ambrosio came to see a connection between the room in which he felt trapped by illness and the cell Kolbe shared with nine other men. 

“It felt like I was meeting somebody who understood the suffering that I was going through and who didn’t just understand it, but who had entered that willingly to be alongside me in it. It was a new way of being able to see Christ and His sacrifice in the Cross, just a modern rendering of that through Kolbe’s sanctity,” he said.

Partly for budgetary reasons and partly because it is the part of the story that D’Ambrosio found most compelling, the film begins at the point Kolbe steps forward to take the place of Franciszek Gajowniczek, chosen as the 10th man to be punished because one of the prisoners in their barracks had escaped. At Auschwitz, it was the practice to commit 10 men to death by starvation as recompense for the escape of one. The death camp guards had come to expect that prisoners would die within two to three days and that those days would be ones of inhuman degradation. Reports of attempted cannibalism were not uncommon. The miracle wrought in the cell occupied by Kolbe was that his sacrifice led not just to his own sanctification but to that of the men whom he accompanied to death.

“Kolbe was able to get these men to stay alive for 14 days without food and water, singing and praising God throughout. I just was like, man, he brought other people into sanctity along with him by entering their suffering,” said D’Ambrosio.

The Auschwitz cell became for D’Ambrosio a metaphor for modern suffering.

“I think a cell, an empty cell, is an incredible metaphor, the same way that a Cross is a great metaphor for suffering. A cell is a much more modern version. It’s got the taste and feeling of modern suffering in it, the exclusion, the sense of lack of belonging, the darkness, the isolation.”

The film project is an expansion of a 2018 short film D’Ambrosio made for the Archdiocese of Dallas while he was a youth ministry coordinator for a Catholic parish.

“It was for an artistic event that was meant to attract young people who were disaffiliated from their faith, to bring them into conversations about faith again. The idea was to wrap the topic around grief and doubt. I was like, well, ‘Why don’t we do a Twelve Angry Men-style short film?’ It’s like a conversation between Kolbe and these other men about the reasons for hope.” 

The short film was well received and provided the base for seeking funding and engagement for the larger project.

D’Ambrosio says he has been very fortunate in the calibre of the people who have come on board.

“There’s just many people that have joined the project that perhaps worked in the industry and understood that there was something really special that God was doing with this film and wanted to be involved, just for the pure sake of making something for His glory.” 

It is the appeal of Kolbe to those disaffiliated youth that D’Ambrosio hopes to communicate through the film.

“There is no ability in this story for us to do the God’s Not Dead version of the triumphalist Christian storytelling that has been, I think, common fare for the last decade. It’s too real. It’s too raw,” he said. “Even his act of volunteering to join them is not enough to get them to not be angry with God and to come alongside him in his mission, to pray for the camp and create this little militia of voices that are singing the songs that no one else can sing.

“For him to get these men to sing with him, to pray with him, he must become as vulnerable as they are and opens to them in a way that makes him a real father for them. I think so many people feel desperate for a father that’s credible during the trials of their lives, that doesn’t have something that’s pithy to say but instead enters the mystery of their suffering, all the way.”