Academy Awards, USA 1987
| Winner Oscar | Best Foreign Language Film
Netherlands.
|
Cannon Films
Directed by Fons Rademakers
My rating: 2.5 stars out of 4
IMDb Wikipedia
In the waning days of WWII in the Netherlands, a family struggles to survive the harsh winter. One night, a Nazi collaborator is shot in the street outside their house. They witness neighbors move the body in front of their house, and when the occupying Nazis show up they blame the family for the killing, arrest them and several others, then set the house on fire. Everyone in the family is killed by the Nazis except for a young boy, who is brought to a nearby police station and put in jail. His cell mate, a woman, comforts him, and later turns out to be involved in the murder of the collaborator. The boy grows up, goes to college, gets married and starts a family. However, that long night still haunts him. He meets a man who knows most of the story of who killed the collaborator and why, and the woman in the cell with him turns out to have been his wife. More years pass, and now in the early 1980s he participates in an anti-nuke march. There in the vast crowd, by some wild coincidence, he meets the woman who moved the body of the collaborator and she explains her motives. Occasionally moving story but falters in the bigger connections it tries to make between Nazis, Vietnam and the anti-nuke movement. The plot relies too much on implausible coincidences.
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