A very moving film

Rating: 10/10 (5 October 2008)

Contains spoiler. I took my 10 year old son to see this.I thought it would be a film about friendship arising in bizarre situations more than anything else, and with a happy ending.The promo poster, with the 2 boys sitting near each other under an attractive colourful sky is quite deceiving, too. The ending, which happens very quickly was a real shock to me, because I understood it. My son, however, didn't understand it, as, to him, it was just a bunch of naked people going into a shower. When the credits started rolling, he said he didn't understand it. I was really quite choked up. It is a brilliant film. Of coarse, the cinema was dead silent for a couple of minutes. So I told him I'd explain it a bit later, which I did when we left. I wasn't quite prepared to tell him about the Holocaust, (I don't believe a 10 year old should know of the appalling things that have happened),and I don't think he really understood it afterwards. At the Imperial War Museums' permanent Holocaust exhibition, they do not let children younger than 14 in. I believe this is more appropriate. How can a child understand this subject matter? So I think it should have been given a 15 certificate, at least.
As I said, the film is great. The German characters speaking English was a good idea. It made them appear more like people we may know. More like "normal" people, which, of coarse they were. Anyone can be brainwashed. The German population had it all through the 30s. Can any one person among us say they would have been immune to it? The music score, usually so overpowering and overdone in most modern films, was very subtle. There was one scene with a very effective contrast, during the first encounter of the 2 boys, the very healthy looking German on the one side of the barbed wire (which wasn't shown during his shot), with the green trees and blue sky behind him,all very peaceful, then the shot of the Jewish boy (dirty, missing teeth, shaved head, wire in shot),with concrete and dirt around him, and people shouting in the distance.
The film also succeeded in keeping EVERYONES' attention the whole way through, a rare thing, and the way nobody spoke at the end, was uncanny. I've never been to the cinema and witnessed that before.