Movie of the Week

Au revoir, les enfants (French for Goodbye, Children) is a 1987 film written, produced and directed by Louis Malle. The screenplay was published by Gallimard in the same year. The film is based on events in the childhood of the director, Louis Malle, who at age 11 was attending a Roman Catholic boarding school near Fontainebleau. One day, he witnessed a Gestapo raid in which three Jewish students and a Jewish teacher were rounded up and deported to Auschwitz. All four were gassed on arrival. The school’s headmaster, Lucien Bunel – Père Jacques de Jesus, was arrested for harboring them and sent to the concentration camp at Mauthausen. He died shortly after the camp was liberated by the American Army, having refused to leave until the last French prisoner was repatriated. Forty years later, Yad Vashem granted the title Righteous Among the Nations to Pere Jacques. The film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

(From wikipedia)