Au Revoir les Enfants

Louis Malle's Au Revoir les Enfants (Goodbye, Children) won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1987 and the César for Best Film, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. The film is autobiographical: Malle had himself been a student at the Petit-Collège d'Avon, the Catholic boarding school in Vichy France where the events of the film took place, and the experience of seeing one of his Jewish classmates taken away by the Gestapo in January 1944 had haunted him for forty years before he committed it to screen.

1944. Eleven-year-old Julien Quentin (Gaspard Manesse) returns to his Catholic boarding school in occupied France after the Christmas holidays. A new boy, Jean Bonnet (Raphaël Fejtö), arrives in his class. Across three months a friendship forms between them (wary at first, then close) under the protective discretion of the headmaster Père Jean (Philippe Morier-Genoud). Malle drew the school directly from his own boyhood memory of the Petit-Collège des Carmes in Avon, where he had been a student in the same period.

Malle waited more than four decades before committing the material to screen, and the discipline of that delay is everywhere in the film, the refusal to soften or amplify, the camera's patience with childhood routine, the absence of an adult interpretive voice. Beyond the Golden Lion and three Césars, the film was nominated for two Academy Awards and remains one of the most enduring works of post-war French Catholic-Jewish memory cinema.