Camden Movies: Au Revoir Les Enfants | Highgate Film Society

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The Review - AT THE MOVIES with DAN CARRIER
Published: 16 April 2009

Pick of the Indies

THE Highgate Film Society has a strong track record of dusting off classics for their monthly sessions at the Highgate Scientific and Literary Institute, and in April the club have selected the 1987 French movie Au Revoir les Enfants.
Director Louis Malle used traumatic events from his childhood in Fontainebleau, France, during the war as the basis for this drama.
Malle saw Gestapo officers round up three Jewish students and their Jewish teacher. They were sent to Auschwitz. The school’s headteacher, Pere Jacques, was arrested for harbouring them in his Roman Catholic school and was also sent to a concentration camp – one he refused to leave until the last French person there had been repatriated after the war. He died soon after liberation, and was awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority,.
We meet Julien, a pampered French schoolboy who is sent to boarding school from the luxury of his mother’s Parisian apartment in early 1943. He then meets three new classmates and gradually they become friends: until he overhears one of the boys praying in Hebrew at night and wearing a kippah.
Julien soon discovers that the boy, Jean Bonnet, is really called Jean Kippelstein and is being sheltered by the Roman Catholic teachers who are using their school to hide Jewish people from the Nazis.
What unfolds is a moving drama of the highest order, and if you have yet to watch this film, join the Highgate Film Society and make the most of this opportunity to see it on a big screen.

• Au Revoir Les Enfants will be shown on April 23, at 8pm. To join the society and for more information, call 020 8340 3343

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