21st February, 2013

Source: The Independent

The Australian director Cate Shortland has made a quite stunning film about the collapse of Nazi Germany, seen not from a Berlin bunker but through the eyes of a 14-year-old girl whose SS father and mother, complicit in war atrocities, have disappeared to face the music.

Lore (Saskia Rosendahl), now in loco parentis, must conduct her four younger siblings from the family home in Bavaria to their grandmother’s farm, 500 miles to the north outside Hamburg. Travelling on foot through a countryside littered with corpses and scavenged by starving natives like themselves, the children survive by trading their parents’ jewellery for food, ever mindful of the occupying forces – Russian and American – closing in…