Anthony Hopkins as Sir Nicholas Winton in “One Life.” Photo: Courtesy of TIFF

The official trailer was released last week for the upcoming film One Life, in which star actor Sir Anthony Hopkins takes on the lead role of Sir Nicholas Winton, a British stockbroker whose real life heroic efforts saved hundreds of children from Nazi persecution on the eve of World War II.

The film, made in collaboration with BBC Films and See Saw Films, stars actor Johnny Flynn as a young Winton while Hopkins plays him during his older years. When Flynn’s character is asked in the trailer why he is risking his life to help hundreds of children, he replies, “Because I may be able to do something about it — I must.”

The extended cast includes Helena Bonham Carter — whose grandfather saved thousands from the Holocaust — as Winton’s German-Jewish mother, Babette Winton, and Jonathan Pryce as Martin Blake. Carter’s character tells a young Winton in the film, “Nicky, you must know, we cannot save them all. You have to forgive yourself.”

Winton visited Prague in December 1938 and found thousands of refugees who fled the Nazis in Germany and Austria and now faced the threat of a Nazi invasion in Czechoslovakia. Over the course of the next few years, he helped transport nearly 700 children, mostly Jewish, safely from Czechoslovakia to London through the Kindertransport initiative, up until the borders closed.

Afterwards, for five decades, Winton lived with grief and guilt over the children he could not save — until the live BBC television show That’s Life! surprised him by introducing him to some surviving children, who are now adults. That real life moment is one of many emotional scenes portrayed in One Life.

Winton was nicknamed the “British Schindler” for his efforts and knighted in 2003 by Queen Elizabeth II. He died in 2015 at the age of 106.