Steven Spielberg's Amblin Partners Picks Up World War II Drama (Exclusive)

The Hollywood Reporter
February 8, 2018

The director's company has optioned the forthcoming book 'Daughters of the Resistance.'

Steven Spielberg is going back to World War II, this time with a female-centric point of view.

Spielberg's Amblin Partners has preemptively optioned Daughters of the Resistance: Valor, Fury, and the Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos, a book proposal by Judy Batalion.

The project will be produced under the DreamWorks Pictures label with Batalion as a co-producer.

The proposal promises a narrative history unveiling the previously untold story of young Jewish women and girls who fought in the Resistance against the Nazis, based on the author's original discovery of these women's firsthand accounts in Yiddish.

Batalion previously wrote White Walls: A Memoir About Motherhood, Daughterhood, and the Mess in Between, a memoir about growing up with a hoarder and how that affected her when she had her own daughter. She is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors.

The option agreement follows the proposal's sale earlier this week. The latter was a preemptive sale to Rachel Kahan, the William Morrow editor who was behind Hidden Figures, the best-seller adapted into a Hollywood blockbuster that revealed the untold story of black female mathematicians who were the secret key in the early space race.

Daughters of the Resistance is set to publish in 2020.

The book pickup continues Spielberg's ongoing interest to tell stories about World War II. He directed two Oscar-winning movies on the subject, Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, produced Clint Eastwood's twofer Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima, and executive produced the award-winning miniseries Band of Brothers and The Pacific for HBO.

Spielberg also founded the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education.

Batalion is repped by CAA, Alia Hanna Habib at The Gernert Company, and attorney Peter Sample at Jackoway Tyerman.