Elle s’appelait Sarah, is a French film known in English as Sarah’s Key. Directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner and starring Kristin Scott-Thomas, it is based upon a novel of the same name by Tatiana de Rosnay. Although this is not an Italian film, it does feature a brief episode in Firenze. And with an upcoming journey to France on the horizon; this blog will inevitably merge into ramblings about both Italy and France, and everywhere in between.
This film is one of the most heart-wrenching films I have ever seen. The acting is refined and the cinematography stunning. Before watching this, I had had no idea at all about the Vel d’Hiv Roundup, had never even heard of the horror that had gone on in Paris during World War II. It’s still so hard to believe that all this happened not that long ago at all; and both tragic and guilty to think that the world really has not learnt from the horrors of the past.
‘… Kristin Scott-Thomas stars as Julia Jarmond, an American journalist living in Paris with her French husband and teenage daughter. When Julia is commissioned to write an article about the notorious 1942 Vel d’Hiv Roundup, she stumbles upon a secret which will change her life, and that of her family, forever.
Julia’s research draws a connection between the family apartment that she and her husband are renovating, and its former residents, the Jewish Starzynski family. Resolving to discover what became of them, she finds herself focusing on the fate of their daughter, Sarah, in an investigation that takes her across France and even back to America. The more Julia unearths, the more she discovers about Bertrand’s famiy, about France and, finally, about herself.’
