Lore

The Australian director Cate Shortland's Lore (2012) is a German-language drama that views the end of the Second World War through an unusual and unsettling lens: the perspective of children raised as Nazis. Adapted from Rachel Seiffert's novel The Dark Room, it was Australia's submission for the foreign-language Oscar and won the audience award at Locarno.

Saskia Rosendahl is remarkable as Lore, the adolescent forced into sudden responsibility for her siblings as the Reich crumbles and her parents vanish into custody. Shortland films the journey in tactile, impressionistic close-ups — sunlight through leaves, dirt, skin, decay — immersing the viewer in the children's sensory present rather than explaining the history around them. The drama lies in Lore's dawning, reluctant confrontation with the ideology in which she was steeped, embodied by the Jewish youth whose presence she cannot reconcile with what she was taught.

Critics praised its beauty and its moral seriousness, and Rosendahl's debut announced a major talent. By refusing easy judgement and staying inside a perpetrator-aligned child's awakening, the film finds a fresh and disquieting angle on much-filmed history. Sensuous, sorrowful and morally complex, Lore is a coming-of-age story set amid the rubble of a poisoned worldview, and one of the most distinctive war films of its decade. Rosendahl's debut announced a major talent, and the film's perpetrator's-eye view of the war's end gives it a moral discomfort and a sensory beauty that linger long after it ends.