Hindsight

Classic kids or 100 films the kids in your life have to see by 13 or else!

Day 73:  Au Revoir Les Enfants (1987) "Goodbye, Children"
* kids at least 10 years old

This is a beautiful study of childhood friendship, and the love that can be forged between similar souls.  It is also a heartbreaking film that speaks to the horror of anti-semitism during the second World War. The french filmmaker, Louis Malle, not only directed and produced, but wrote the screenplay.  The film is semi-autobiographical and tells the story of Julien Quentin (the Malle character) and his childhood friendship with a boy named Jean Bonnet.  It is the winter of 1943, at a the Carmelite boarding school in Nazi occupied France.  The two boys become fast friends because they are both socially awkward and both love the piano and math.  Julien wakes up one morning because He hears Jean Bonnet praying in Hebrew.  Eventually, Julien realizes that Jean is Jewish and in hiding.  The rest of the film deals with the boys growing attachment, built upon a secret they must keep, or expose Jean to the Nazis.  

Louis Malle based this movie on an event in his own childhood, when He attended a Catholic boarding school in France.  Malle was a bystander to a Gestapo raid of his school, and the concluding round-up of some of his classmates as they were then taken to Auschwitz.  

Themes:  WWII, Anti-Semitism, Friendship, Betrayal 
Media Literacy Questions for kids:  Why does the film end with a voice-over narration?  Why did Jean Bonnet have to hide?  How did Louis Malle create a setting that replicated France in the middle 1940s? Is there a simple moral to the story?