vernon film society
Bringing the best in world and Canadian film to film lovers of Vernon and the North Okanagan
SARAH’S KEY
Monday, October 3
Gilles Paquet-Brenner
Cast: Kristin Scott Thomas, Melusine Mayance, Niels Arestrup, Frederic Pierrot
Run Time: 111 minutes
Country: France
Year: 2011
Language: French with English subtitles
Rating: PG (Coarse language)
A Gala Presentation at the 2010 Toronto Inter¬national Film Festival® and based on Tatiana de Rosnay’s bestselling novel of the same name, Sarah’s Key is a fictionalized account of the actual roundups in Paris that sentenced thousands of Jewish families to their deaths. Starring Kristin Scott Thomas (Nowhere Boy, I’ve Loved You So Long), the film is a harrowing and profoundly mov¬ing tale about a terrible period of French history.
In the summer of 1942, ten-year-old Sarah Starzynski (Mélusine Mayance) knows something is wrong. There is a panic spreading through the city. The French gendarmes, supposedly under order from the Vichy government and Nazi occu¬piers, are going door-to-door arresting Jewish families and imprisoning them in the Vélodrome d'Hiver. Little does Sarah know that, after the imprisonment, they will be sent to Nazi death camps. In an attempt to save her family, she locks her four-year-old brother, Michel in a bedroom cupboard – their secret hiding place. She prom¬ises to return for him, but she and her parents are dragged from their home forever.
Sixty years later, journalist Julia Jarmond (Scott Thomas) is assigned to write a cover story on the Vel’d’Hiv roundup of 1942. American by birth, Julia has been living in Paris for more than twenty years, and is married to Bertrand Tézac (Frédéric Pierrot), an unfaithful man from an old French bloodline. What begins as research for her arti¬cle becomes more personal when Julia discovers that she and Sarah have something in common, prompting her to change her outlook on her hus¬band, her adopted nation and herself.
Evocatively shot, with a solid ensemble cast lead by a pitch-perfect Scott Thomas, Sarah’s Key pro¬vides a realistic and morally complex approach to history that is as captivating as it is unforgettable.
“The movie gathers momentum with a steady, assured pace, accumulating incidents, charac¬ters, secrets and lies until the rush of events is absolutely transfixing. Cinema can some¬times rival the novel in compulsive intensity and Sarah's Key is one such example.” – Kirk Honeycutt, The Hollywood Reporter
