Sarah’s Key: Lessons from history

“We are all products of history,” says a dying father to his son William. The scene is from the poignant narrative film Sarah’s Key, a 2010 French-English film directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner.

How true! Of course we are all products of our history, whether we like it or not. History may be the thing of the past, but no one must forget history and history must shape our present and put us in right mode for the future. The difficulty is when we refuse to learn from history and make the same mistakes over and over again, as it happens in the world today.

Director: Gilles Paquet-Brenner

Film Clip

The film is about a journalist’s (Julia played by Kristine Scot-Thomas) quest to go behind history to know the truth about the deportation of hundreds of French Jews to concentration camps in Auschwitz during the Second World War. Most of them died there, though one of the two little girls who escaped the camp managed to survive. The journalist takes it upon herself to find out where and how that little girl Sarah, who escaped in 1942, is in the present. Her journey takes her to different places and different people. She has also to face the reality, though with a little relief at the end, that her family too is somehow connected to the whole episode of that deportation. Does she find Sarah? How does she confront her? The answer to these questions makes the crux of the whole narrative and is depicted with utmost precision, raising curiosity at each stage.

The film goes back and forth between 1940s and 2009. This also adds to the poetic narrative, though very heartrending in certain places. However, nowhere does the director attempt to portray a melodramatic tale, even as the issue is painfully stark and inhuman. He, rather, tries to draw an optimistic tale.

The Second World War and Hitler’s Anti-Semitism have inspired many films. This film is unique in its portrayal of the sordid tale as it dances between melancholic pessimism and incorrigible optimism. 

- Melwyn Pinto SJ