The screenings of this film have been made possible by the Amsterdam 4 and 5 May Committee. The screening on 5 May can be attended for €2.50. Cineville reservations are also valid.
Louis Malle made Au revoir les enfants later in life, but the film looks back on something that had haunted him all his life. A personal memory, told without embellishment, but with great clarity.
Malle based the screenplay on an experience from his own youth. During World War II, at his Catholic boarding school, a Jewish classmate—along with the priest who was hiding him—was arrested by the Gestapo. The farewell he remembered from that moment — “Au revoir, les enfants!” — would decades later become the title and emotional core of his film.
The story is set in occupied France in 1944. Julien, a sensitive and somewhat introverted boy, gains a new classmate: Jean Bonnet. Their friendship slowly blossoms, but remains fraught with tension. Jean carries a secret, and Julien begins to suspect what it might be. Malle portrays their relationship without sentimentality, with an eye for the everyday reality of school life: lessons, cold dormitories, childish quarrels, piano lessons, chess games — all under a veil of menace that is rarely made explicit, yet constantly felt.
Au revoir les enfants was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and received multiple César and Oscar nominations. Yet it is not a film that seeks drama or moral pathos. Malle observes, without grand gestures. It is precisely this restraint that makes the film so powerful.
Where other war films paint history in broad strokes, Malle opts for the personal, the small-scale. He shows how betrayal can stem from fear or jealousy, and how complicity can sometimes lie in silence.
More than a war film, Au revoir les enfants is an exercise in remembrance. An attempt to do justice to something that can never be undone — and that, for that very reason, must be told.