****

Rating: 10/10 (20 October 2015)

An extremely powerful and effective World War 11 film dealing with the life of Lou, a 1936 American athlete at the Berlin Olympics.
Under impressive direction by Angelina Jolie, the film shows us his early life where he was called all sorts of derogatory terms for being Italian and how he overcame this. This and his running achievements as an athlete gave him the new found encouragement to survive treatment in a Japanese internment camp for soldiers, where brutality was common every moment with the most barbaric acts perpetrated against the prisoners. The Japanese knew they had an Olympic hero in their midst and they saved a lot of that brutality for him.
His surviving was utterly amazing as he withstood plenty of torture and refused the easy way out by not participating in anti-American Japanese propaganda which would have made his stay in Japan a totally different story.
A great film of determination and overcoming perils and obstacles all along the way.