Director Matt Whitaker’s Truth & Treason arrives in local theaters on the heels of Raoul Peck’s smashing documentary Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5. Two anti-authoritarian films in a row at a time when most of us need a wake-up call.

Helmuth Hübener, the 16-year-old protagonist of Whitaker’s historical political drama Truth & Treason, isn’t very big for his age. He and his friends in Hamburg go swimming, horse around with each other and shyly make eye contact with girls their age. But otherwise the slender, bookish Helmuth (played by British actor Ewan Horrocks), son of an army officer and a quiet hausfrau, is seemingly an ordinary adolescent onlooker as Germany wages war in 1941.

He’s more interested in his job at the city hall bureau of records and his new acquisition, a contraband shortwave radio,

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