One of the great films about childhood and certainly one of Louis Malle's very finest films, "Au revoir les enfants" is set in a boy's boarding school in German-occupied France during World War Two and tells of the friendship that develops between two boys, one a well-to-do French boy and the other a Jew, hiding out in the Catholic run school and whose identity is a secret from all but the teaching staff.
It's deeply moving as you can imagine while also working as a wartime thriller, (it's one of a handful of French films to deal with those who were collaborators), but it's in the minutiae of everyday life within the school and in the interaction between the boys, all superb and all superbly directed by Malle, that the film really scores. The adults are mostly in the background; the children are the stars here and both Gaspard Manesse and Raphael Fejto as the two boys at the centre are outstanding. A classic of French cinema that demands to be seen.
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