As I write this, scenes for the new movie "La Rafle" (The Raid) are being shot in Budapest. The movie takes place in Vichy, France, where, on the 16th July 1942, 13,152 French Jews, including thousands of children, were arrested by police and deported to Nazi camps. Why? Because they were Jewish.
The living nightmare began with a five day journey to the French camps where people were crammed into small wagons and carried to various prisons around France with no food, no water at any point and nowhere to urinate. Stripped from their belongings and torn apart from their loved ones, the victims would be shot if they tried to escape and hundreds attempted suicide. Of those that made it, around 7000 would be taken to Auschwitz, to be tortured, abused, starved, and left to die on top of one another in pits. Only 811 would come back home after the war had ended, 5 years later.
“La Rafle” attaches particular attention to the sheer number of children involved in the raid, one of whom is lucky to be alive today. It is with this in mind that the director Roselyne Bosch, ex reporter at French intellectual magazine “Le Point”, set out to find him and find out exactly what had happened. She wasn't interested in guessing history to draw on emotional strings but in capturing the reality that these people endured, and reproducing the events as they had happened. The man in question, Joseph Weissmann, is in his seventies and is on set with the actors every step of the way, re-living the events as he experienced them, thus enhancing the unique truth of the film. A story so shocking, so profound and so immensely sad, considering the man saw his entire family die one after the other, and indeed, believed he would suffer the same fate. A story he has never told anyone until now, so fragile are his emotions concerning the event.
What struck me about this extraordinary new feature film is the devotion that Bosh has put into the work, as though she is on a real mission to deliver a message that will question people's notions on the historical event and make them think about the nature of humanity. "I'm making a movie about life, less about death" says Bosch, "I'm making a movie for the future, less than for the past. And I'm doing it for my children, who bear the name of their grand parents”. She hopes that the film will allow people to change their minds on preconceived notions they may have. She wants to shed light on issues that have not been mentioned in previous movies on the same theme, such as the cowardice of the Parisian people. There were some, of course, who were more courageous, who came out of the war with their heads held high because they dared to disobey orders to save lives, but they were a minority. The plot aims to depict this paradoxical France which, despite the zeal of its police towards the enemy, was the least efficient European country in terms of its efforts to halt deportation.
The writing of the script took Bosch two years and a half. “I wanted it to consist solely of real episodes. When Hitler or Putin are talking, it is their words, as they are written in the trial record books, and official reference documents.” Hitler, she stresses, appears as we have never seen him before (although I recall the film "Downfall" paints a similar character portrayal), as an overdosed and unstable junkie, on constant adrenaline shots given to him by his personal doctors. Six Hundred extras have been called upon, the majority of which are children, for the scenes which make us relive the never-ending custody of the Vel d'Hiv event and the internment at the camps.
The writing of the script took Bosch two years and a half. “I wanted it to consist solely of real episodes. When Hitler or Putin are talking, it is their words, as they are written in the trial record books, and official reference documents.” Hitler, she stresses, appears as we have never seen him before (although I recall the film "Downfall" paints a similar character portrayal), as an overdosed and unstable junkie, on constant adrenaline shots given to him by his personal doctors. Six Hundred extras have been called upon, the majority of which are children, for the scenes which make us relive the never-ending custody of the Vel d'Hiv event and the internment at the camps.
The major difficulty of working on such a dramatically true story? “Avoiding a superfluous and stylised set." says the set director "Being realistic without shocking. Keeping the images in our heads without sordidly recreating them. People died in the universe which we are re-creating. One must respect that". The same task was experienced by Pierre- Jean Larroque, the costume designer, challenged to re-create costumes and adorn them with thousands of yellow stars.
The star studded cast includes French Actors Jean Reno, Ludivine Sagnier (Swimming Pool) and Jewish Comedian Gad Elmaleh (Priceless). "I was vaguely aware of the events of the Vél' d'Hiv and like many Sephardi Jews” Elmaleh explains, “I have a sort of guilt complex towards the Ashkenazi community, due to what they suffered. We have the same religion, but not the same history. It is an honour for me to participate in such a project, which will act as a memorial and educate future generations." Alain Goldman, the film’s producer, dreams of opening the movie in February 2010 at the Berlin Film Festival. He believes this will be a beautiful way to show friendship can be restored and the possibility of forgiveness exists. There is no doubt it would be a powerful platform to extend our respect in memory of those that died. For those of us who are in any way linked to the victims, that memory is crucial.
