Reviewed by Bill Blake
Like The Diary of Anne Frank and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, A Bag Of Marbles is about a child’s experience of the terrible events of the Holocaust.
Based on a true story, Canadian director Christian Duguay’s film Un Sac des Billes tells the true story of Jewish boys Joseph and his older brother Maurice and their escape from Nazi-controlled Paris.
Under the increasingly oppressive Nazi rule, the family decides to pack up their barber’s shop and leave for the French Free Zone.
Given money by their father, the boys are sent alone on their journey to meet up with the rest of their family in Nice. At the end of an exhausting trip, they find four months of happiness with their family until they’re forced to leave once again.
The brothers end up hiding in a Catholic boarding school and remain there until they are bundled into a Nazi Police HQ and relentlessly questioned for weeks about their ethnicity, until a Jewish doctor working for the Nazis helps them go.
Watching the film, it is hard to believe this is a true story, and it’s an incredible moment when the two now elderly brothers are shown during the end credits.
Young actors Dorian Le Clech and Batyste Fleurial deliver fantastic and believable performances as the two boys, as do Patrick Bruel and Elsa Zylberstein as their parents.
I’d recommend this film to anyone looking for a Holocaust film from a different perspective, or just a great – though sometimes brutally realistic – real-life adventure movie.
A Bag Of Marbles is screening at the 2017 Alliance Française French Film Festival.
