Julia

American playwright Lillian Hellman recounts a story from the mid-1930s leading into WWII concerning her best childhood friend, the wealthy Julia, who was raised by her maternal grandparents. At the time of this story, Hellman is just starting her writing career, and is in a relationship with older novelist Dashiell Hammett who also acts as her mentor, while Julia, a medical student, is living in Vienna where she hoped to study under such luminaries as Sigmund Freud. Direct visits between Lily and Julia are now infrequent due to the Nazi uprising in the central Europe, including in Austria. Lily does discover that Julia has been hospitalized in assisting her school colleagues against Nazi beatings and murders. This action by Julia only continues her mindset toward activism against anything she sees as being socially or politically corrupt. Lily's career begins to blossom, albeit with its own obstacles, with the mounting of her first play, The Children's Hour, on Broadway. Thereafter, she is invited to attend a conference in Russia, when she plans to stop in Vienna en route from Paris to see Julia if she is still there, she not having heard from Julia of late despite attempt after attempt to contact her. However, Lily learns through a friend of Julia's, a man named Johann, that she is making a request of her friend, which Julia states through Johann she can turn down if she so chooses: to change the route of her trip through Berlin instead of Vienna to smuggle $50,000 of Julia's money into Germany to help fund the resistance. Despite not seeing herself as a heroic type of person like Julia and despite the added personal risk of being Jewish in Nazi Germany, Lily agrees. En route, Lily has to read the cues correctly of those around her to learn who she can and cannot trust, reading those cues incorrectly which could lead to her and Julia's demise. Lily will also learn of another request from her friend, one of a more personal nature, and as such perhaps more important to Lily to achieve.