'Sarah's Key' was first seen in San Francisco at the 31st San Francisco Jewish Film Festival earlier this month. There are 8 million stories about the Holocaust, with only a small fraction having been depicted in film. As 'Sarah's Key' demonstrates, each story is not about just one person, but a large network of people, a circle of friends and relatives, as well as people who never met or even knew about the particular victim, and whose lives are influenced for generations to come. The ripple effect caused by anti-semitism and genocide has not yet settled. For instance, Sarah (Melusine Mayance) was among the 13,000 Jews rounded up by French police, not German soldiers (a fact that should not be forgotten) in 1942, and corralled in the Velodrome d'Hiver, a sports arena, for several days without food, water, or sanitation facilities. They were then moved to the Dancy internment camp, from which Sarah escaped, then onward to Auschwitz for eventual extermination. Six decades later an American journalist, Julia (Kristen Scott Thomas), with her architect husband, is preparing to move into the apartment his father and grandparents lived in. Julia follows lead after lead for a story she is writing about the 60th anniversary of the Roundup, and eventually finds out the whole story of the apartment's previous tenants and how it came into her husband's family's possession. Should she have upset the present to uncover the past is a relevant question she is asked by many she interviews in her search for the truth. But being a dedicated journalist and truth seeker, she is a slave to her profession and can't stop probing.
Sarah's Key
Director: Gilles Paquet-Brenner
Writters: Serge Joncour, Gilles Paquet-Brenner, based on novel by Tatiana De Rosnay
Cast: Kristin Scott Thomas, Mélusine Mayance, Niels Arestrup, Frédéric Pierrot, Michel Duchaussoy, Dominique Frot, Gisèle Casadesus, Aidan Quinn, Natasha Mashkevich
Time: 102 min.
Rated: PG-13
Opens August 5 at the Embarcadero Cinema in San Francisco
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