Jean Reno (Leon: The Professional) stars in this French holocaust drama that highlights the often overlooked involvement France had with the Nazi regime during its occupation.
"On 19 July 1942, 13,000 French Jews were rounded up by their own country’s police and locked inside a Paris velodrome – en route to Nazi concentration camps. 70 years later, French admission of such instrumental collaboration in the Holocaust has become a queasy cultural phenomenon (already familiar to anyone who has seen Sarah's Key). Rose Bosch’s elaborately staged The Round Up directly confronts the known events, dramatising scenes of official connivance alongside the unfolding experience of the baffled victims." (Source: NZ International Film Festival 2011)
The Round Up, or La rafle in French, first sounded to me like it might be a film about the poison used to kill weeds. This isn’t an entirely incorrect metaphor, considering the film is about the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup in 1942, where the French police aimed to round up 20,000 Jews to deport to Germany for Hitler’s insane agenda.
The police only managed to wrangle just over 10,000 – the remainder having been successfully hidden by Parisians. What happened to those people who were rounded up is the subject of this film, through the lens of a Jewish doctor, a French nurse and the Jewish families of one tenement.
I usually steer clear of films about the holocaust. I’m ashamed to admit I felt like I’d heard it all. For me, and perhaps for others too, I’d become desensitised to the holocaust; it had become a cliché. Hitler and his many accomplices, all their gruesome actions, had become rehashed scenarios, just words in books and exhibits at museums. The Round Up crashes through this apathy, however, by showing the simple, honest cost of the French government’s decision to choose politics over people.
The Round Up isn’t gratuitous, but it is unflinching. Passionately acted, this is liberal France’s chance to highlight the extreme mistake their acting government made in delivering the people they had granted asylum to their own deaths.
By Lily Richards, Flicks.co.nz
We've been told the NZ release date for this flick is Thursday, 29th Sep 2011.
Release date: September 29th 2011.
We haven't received times for this movie in this location yet. However these are updated as cinemas announce them, so check back soon. Hopefully the lovely cinemas in your location will choose to play it shortly. ~Ed.
