02/00
Lisa Gossels's The Children of Chabannes, one of the many films in the 23rd Portland [Oregon] International Film Festival for the year 2000, is a well-meaning if undramatically edited HBO documentary about a basically secular city in the Clarmont-Ferrand region of France, the setting of so many films by Truffaut, Rohmer, Miller, and others, that during the war contrived to rescue some 400 German-Jewish children from the Nazis. Godson's father and uncle were among them. Her tribute to the city that saved them, and to the surviving spirit of her family, is occasioned by a reunion in 1998 of surviving children, villagers, and teachers. Resembling earlier documentaries on similar feats of self-sacrifice by teachers in French villages, it's an important and uplifting tale, an account of a minor miracle in a time of wholesale tragedy, but Gossels doesn't seem to want to present her material dramatically. The film is mostly talking heads. The moments of Schindleresque suspense are presented mutedly, at the end, as if she felt that to dramatize the material were to insult the sacred gravity of the situation. But just on an informational level, the structure of the film conspires to neutralize everything. The story of the head of the school that spearheaded the rescue mission is told in a perfunctory manner; the tale of two teaching sisters is presented anti-dramatically; and their intermingled stories are told in a chronology that denies the tales their, to Gossels perhaps, "false" drama.
Still, the details, as you reconstruct them later in your head, make for a moving tale of resiliance and dedication in the face of one of history's scoundral times.
For more information about the film festival, visit the website for the Northwest Film Center.
Return to Cinemonkey Home Page