#8 We just watched this on Netflix streaming. You should too!:

Au revoir les enfants (Goodbye Children)

The Film:  Au revoir les enfants (Goodbye Children)

Holocaust films are fairly ubiquitous these days, as certainly they should be, and the atrocities that happened are well known. It is hard for people these days to understand the pervasive misunderstanding of what the holocaust was in the contemporary time it was happening. It wasn’t even referenced as the Holocaust until decades later.

Les Enfants is not exactly an exploration of this idea, but highlights it for me perfectly. Children are not racist, but learn racism slowly as they grow up. The film is based on the director’s real-life memories of growing up in a Roman Catholic boarding school in occupied France. It is a film more about misunderstanding than sadness and guilt. How can a boy feel guilty when he knew so little about what was going on?

Why to watch it: Its perspective

Rarely do films take such a deliberate and consistent perspective toward a period of time. Many other filmmakers would have cut to  the headmaster discussing his intentions, but instead the director specifically relies on the perspective of the children who had little understanding of the political climate.

Pay attention to this: The pacing

This will be a problem for a lot of people. It is a very slow, deliberate film. Allowing the audience and its characters only small hints of what it is “about”. We’d be hard pressed to guess it is a Holocaust film for the first hour.

However, because it allows so much time to get to know the characters, it is strangely more effective than a more traditional, and inherently entertaining, approach to filmmaking

Watch this right now when you get home from work or school or whatever it is you’re doing….you should be watching this instead. And if you don’t have Netflix streaming….buy it. It costs the same as a shot and a beer at your local bar!