Sarah's Key

2010

PG-13

1h 51m

IMDb RATING

7.3/10

682

YOUR RATING

Rate

POPULARITY

Play trailer

1 Video

42 Images

Drama

War

On the night of 16 July 1942, ten year old Sarah and her parents are being arrested and transported to the Velodrome d'Hiver in Paris where thousands of other jews are being sent to get deported. Sarah however managed to lock her little brother in a closet just before the police entered their apartment. Sixty years later, Julia Jarmond, an American journalist in Paris, gets the assignment to write an article about this raid, a black page in the history of France. She starts digging archives and through Sarah's file discovers a well kept secret about her own in-laws.

Directors

Gilles Paquet-Brenner

Writers

Tatiana De Rosnay(novel by)

Gilles Paquet-Brenner(screenplay by)

Serge Joncour(screenplay by)

Stars

Kristin Scott Thomas

Mélusine Mayance

Niels Arestrup

See production, box office & company info

Videos1

Trailer
Watch Sarah's Key - The Official Trailer HD

Photos42

Top cast

Kristin Scott Thomas

Julia Jarmond

Mélusine Mayance

Sarah Starzynski, child

Jules Dufaure

Bertrand Tezac

Edouard Tezac

Genneviève Dufaure

Rywka Starzynski

Mamé Tezac

William Rainsferd

Rachel

Wladyslaw Starzynski

Mike Bambers

Joshua

Alexandra

Michel Starzynski

Plainclothes policeman

Serpentine Teyssier

Mrs Royer

Simon Eine

Franck Levy

Directors

Gilles Paquet-Brenner

Writers

Tatiana De Rosnay(novel by)

Gilles Paquet-Brenner(screenplay by)

Serge Joncour(screenplay by)

All cast & crew

Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

User reviews1

Review

Featured review

7/10

Gilles Paquet-Brenner has put together quite an engaging cast to tell this story of a woman with an hitherto unknown family history. "Julia" (Dame Kristen Scott Thomas) is a journalist with a French magazine who is assigned to write a story of the infamous rounding-up and deportation of the Jewish population of Paris in 1942. By chance, she and her husband are looking to move into his father's spacious apartment and she discovers something of it's history. It was rented, once, to the "Strazynski" family who were victims of that heinous event. As "Julia" begins to investigate further, she finds herself immersed in a poignant story of a family who made some fairly horrific sacrifices so that at least one of them could survive the atrocities to come. It was the young sister "Sarah" (Mélusine Mayance) who came up with the idea of hiding her brother "Michel" (Paul Mercier) in a cupboard. Once interred, though, she was terrified that he could be left alone, or found, or worse - so with the help of a sympathetic French guard manages to make her way, with a friend, to the farm of "Jules" (Niels Arsetrup) where he and his wife offer her protection from her persecutors and essentially treat her as their own. "Julia" now focusses on what happened next, discovering things perilously close to home as she goes along. Though Dame Kristen does well enough here, it's really the young Mayance who steals the scenes. Her performance as the young girl determined to rescue her sibling delivers the real thrust of just how indiscriminate the persecution of her people was. Age, sex, infirmity - the Nazis didn't care and that attitude is briefly, but well extolled, by images of folks on trains like cattle in transit. There must be loads of similar stories to be told like this, but this one is imaginatively photographed, thoughtfully paced and well worth a watch.

Geronimo196713 Apr, 2024