The deepest secrets of WWII revealed at Movies@Emnotweni

The award-winning Imitation Game is a 2014 historical thriller film about British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing who was a key figure in cracking Nazi Germany’s naval Enigma code which helped the Allies win the Second World War, only to later be criminally prosecuted for his homosexuality. The film stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing, and is directed by Morten Tyldum, with a screenplay by Graham Moore based on the biography Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges.

The film’s screenplay topped the annual Black List for best unproduced Hollywood scripts in 2011. After a bidding process against five other studios, The Weinstein Company acquired the film for $7 million in February 2014, the highest amount ever paid for US distribution rights at the European Film Market.

In terms of historical accuracy, while the broad outline of Turing’s life as depicted in the film is true, a number of historians have noted that elements within it represent distortions of what actually happened, especially in terms of Turing’s work at Bletchley Park during the war and his relationship with friend and fellow code breaker Joan Clarke.