Delightfully Confronting

Rating: 10/10 (10 January 2020)

I'm am so glad that I made the effort to actually get out and see this film because, well, it was mindblowing in so many ways, and pretty funny as well. In fact, it is one of those films that should be a definite watch for many people, particularly in light of the fact that it is about a young German boy living at the close of World War II. The thing is that this boy is 10, so he has not know of a world in which Hitler was not the ruler of Germany, and of course he has basically become brainwashed with all of the propaganda that is being churned out.
Yet his views are about to become challenged, especially when he discovers a young girl hiding in his attic - a Jewish girl - and this is how the film plays out. He doesn't know who knows about the girl, and the girl isn't letting him know about anything either. So, it seems, in many cases, that he has been snookered - and his beliefs about the Jews are also being challenged, particularly once he is confronted by one.
In a way what we are seeing is not just the undoing of Germany, but the undoing of this little boy's world. His father is missing, and his mother is everything, but it turns out that there is so much that he doesn't know, or understand. One interesting line is that he claims to be a Nazi, and this is rebuked because he isn't a Nazi, he just loves Swastikas.
Yet it also confronts us with the reality of racism, of how we will demonise a certain group simply because they are different. The sad reality is that this seems to be happening all over again, yet there is a vast difference between the racism we see now, and the racism back then. They reality is that while we were horrified at what happened during World War II, this type of stuff was going on anyway in many of the allied countries.
However, what is even more worrying is that the dogwhisting tactics that Hitler used to such great success are being used now, today, to turn us against our fellow humans. In reality the Jews weren't all that much different from us, and you couldn't actually tell the difference between a Jew and a non-Jew, though the dog whistling, and racial stereotypes are being painted of people that do look different. In particular, there is this whole 'failure to integrate' argument that is used to destroy a unique, and different, culture.
Yes, this is definitely a timely movie, and a movie for the world that we live in now. It is just sad that those this film should be challenging aren't the people that will be seeing this film.