Sarah's Key

I am on a roll when selecting movies to watch over the last few months. Last night I saw Sarah's Key staring Kristin Scott Thomas, Mélusine Mayance and Niels Arestrup. Thomas plays an American journalist in Paris who embarks on a story about the Holocaust and discovers connections between the past, her present marriage, and her unborn child. Beginning as an article on the 1942 roundup of Jews in France, not by the Germans but the French themselves. Initially they are housed in a Paris coliseum before being sent to Auschwitz. However the story soon becomes a journey of self-discovery as the protagonist stumbles upon a terrible secret of a family forced out of their home and a young girl called Sarah who makes an impulsive decision to leave her younger brother locked in a cupboard. A film about the Holocaust is certain to be moving, but the circumstances in this one are harrowing, the truth astonishing, and the coincidences as unbelievable as the tragedy itself. It is a journalist's quest to dig up the lives of others and unleash the truth, but this film shows the price of these actions. I recommend this film but be warned that it intelligently covers a wide-range of moral and ethical issues that evoke strong emotions.