The Round Up (La rafle) 2010

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. Hide