Elle s'appelait Sarah

Gilles Paquet-Brenner's "Elle s'appelait Sarah" ("Sarah's Key" in English) focuses on an American journalist (Kristin Scott Thomas) trying to find a French-Jewish girl who got rounded up by the Vichy government but escaped the camps. So, the journalist travels from place to place to try and learn what became of Sarah, and the full story of Sarah's locking her brother in a closet so that he wouldn't get arrested. The main point that the movie makes is not only the links that we have to past incidents, like the apartment that the journalist buys, but that atrocities require complicity. In this case, France's Vichy government was perfectly happy to assist the Nazis in the genocide against anyone whom the Nazis considered inferior.

Does the movie have any downsides? Well, maybe jumping back and forth between the present and the past is a little confusing, but it doesn't really drag the movie down. To be certain, I had never heard of the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup before seeing "Sarah's Key". The main that is that this is part of history, it and needs to get told so that it never happens again. Really good movie.