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Sarah's Key

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7.3/10 • 675

2010-09-161h 51m

DramaWar

Uncover the mystery.

On the night of 16 July 1942, ten year old Sarah and her parents are being arrested and transported to the Velodrome d'Hiver in Paris where thousands of other jews are being sent to get deported. Sarah however managed to lock her little brother in a closet just before the police entered their apartment. Sixty years later, Julia Jarmond, an American journalist in Paris, gets the assignment to write an article about this raid, a black page in the history of France. She starts digging archives and through Sarah's file discovers a well kept secret about her own in-laws.

Directors
Gilles Paquet-Brenner
Editors
Hervé Schneid

Top Billed Cast

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  1. Kristin Scott Thomas

    Kristin Scott Thomas

    Julia Jarmond

  2. Mélusine Mayance

    Mélusine Mayance

    Sarah Starzynski, child

  3. Niels Arestrup

    Niels Arestrup

    Jules Dufaure

  4. Frédéric Pierrot

    Frédéric Pierrot

    Bertrand Tezac

  5. Michel Duchaussoy

    Michel Duchaussoy

    Edouard Tezac

  6. Dominique Frot

    Dominique Frot

    Genneviève Dufaure

  7. Natasha Mashkevich

    Natasha Mashkevich

    Rywka Starzynski

  8. Gisèle Casadesus

    Gisèle Casadesus

    Mamé Tezac

  9. Aidan Quinn

    Aidan Quinn

    William Rainsferd

Reviews1

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CinemaSerf Avatar

CinemaSerf

Apr 13, 2024

7/10

Gilles Paquet-Brenner has put together quite an engaging cast to tell this story of a woman with an hitherto unknown family history. "Julia" (Dame Kristen Scott Thomas) is a journalist with a French magazine who is assigned to write a story of the infamous rounding-up and deportation of the Jewish population of Paris in 1942. By chance, she and her husband are looking to move into his father's spacious apartment and she discovers something of it's history. It was rented, once, to the "Strazynski" family who were victims of that heinous event. As "Julia" begins to investigate further, she finds herself immersed in a poignant story of a family who made some fairly horrific sacrifices so that at least one of them could survive the atrocities to come. It was the young sister "Sarah" (Mélusine Mayance) who came up with the idea of hiding her brother "Michel" (Paul Mercier) in a cupboard. Once interred, though, she was terrified that he could be left alone, or found, or worse - so with the help of a sympathetic French guard manages to make her way, with a friend, to the farm of "Jules" (Niels Arsetrup) where he and his wife offer her protection from her persecutors and essentially treat her as their own. "Julia" now focusses on what happened next, discovering things perilously close to home as she goes along. Though Dame Kristen does well enough here, it's really the young Mayance who steals the scenes. Her performance as the young girl determined to rescue her sibling delivers the real thrust of just how indiscriminate the persecution of her people was. Age, sex, infirmity - the Nazis didn't care and that attitude is briefly, but well extolled, by images of folks on trains like cattle in transit. There must be loads of similar stories to be told like this, but this one is imaginatively photographed, thoughtfully paced and well worth a watch.

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  • Sarah's Key poster
  • Sarah's Key poster
  • Sarah's Key poster
  • Sarah's Key poster

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Status
Released
Original Language
French
Budget
$10,000,000.00
Revenue
$17,511,906.00
Keywords
survivor's guiltgood people