Moving, meticulously researched, controversial concentration camp drama. “Hailed as an important step in France’s acknowledgment of its complicity in the crimes of the Occupation.” — The Guardian
It's a straightforward, heartfelt drama, well acted and well produced.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2011
The Round Up 2010
La rafle
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. Seventy 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. Adhering closely to meticulous research, Bosch nevertheless tries to alleviate terror with emotional drama, and to sweeten the indigestible by including in her account one of the few who escaped. But genocide won’t be tamed. Promoted on state-run television and studied in schools, The Round Up is a moving, painfully awkward and significantly belated acknowledgment of what can never ever be adequately admitted. — BG