The film serves a very simple purpose

Rating: 7/10 (6 May 2020)

The film serves a very simple purpose, to show you that if you were a Jew in occupied Poland, every day you were grasping for survival. That the Nazi's took away the dignity of people gradually and got more brazen with killing them as time went on. Because of this very simple narrative some have given the film 1 star which I think is unfair. I have watched some unwatchable films with shaky cam, poor acting, editing etc. This was a pretty decent production with some great Direction not a 1 star film.
However I do have to wonder whether we have moved past this type of simple film. As someone interested in history I occasionally enjoy watching films around the war to see it from another perspective or to get further details that I did not know. The minute I saw Emila Fox's character look wide eyed and shocked at some restrictions, I looked up a timeline of antisemitism in Poland. Turns out like much of Europe antisemitism had been prominent in Poland way before the occupation. It can be dated back atleast a decade just from legal restrictions. From then on I doubted how much care had been put into accuracy. I am sure there is much to be learned from a first hand account that Wladyslaw Szpilman was able to provide in his autobiography but I can't help but think you would get more from reading his book in his words rather than this romanticised version.
It does tell a very simple story of Nazis were bad, Jews were victims and people that helped the Jews were good. However I do believe that this film would be a good introduction for some people to see the war in a more personal , emotive way as I think over time the young have distanced themselves from the atrocities to the point they easily joke about it. I could picture older children watching clips of this film to facilitate their engagement with the subject matter.
However for anyone interested in a beautifully shot epic, their are films on the war that are more visually interesting. For anyone who already knows details around the holocaust their are films that are more informative. Since the millennium I have seen a number of films that look at the war from less well known angles, they look at the Nanjing Massacre, Soviet atrocities while attention was on the Nazis and so on.