Waiting for Anya

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With this story, writer-director Ben Cookson aims to find a gentle way to introduce preteens to understanding the atrocities of World War II. In that way, it's similar to The Sound of Music. But the characters in Waiting for Anya aren't affluent Austrians singing happy songs. Rather, they're French villagers who find themselves in the middle of the Nazis' Jewish genocide due to their location as the last stop on the escape route to Spain. Two Nazi officers lead the operation: the cruel and terrible Lieutenant (Tómas Lemarquis) and the friendly and kind Korporal (Thomas Kretschmann). It's jarring to see a Nazi portrayed positively, but the point is to see the humanity in our enemies. Nazis rarely fall into that territory, and for good reason, but here we see that the Korporal is an independent thinker who isn't in goose step with the Fuhrer's goals. Jo finds out that Jewish children are being smuggled away from the Nazis over the mountains near his village. All goes to plan until German soldiers start patrolling the mountains, and Jo realises the children are trapped. Jo'??s slightest mistake could have devastating consequences … Before making the film, which was shot on location in rural southern France, Cookson travelled to the area to speak to residents, some of whom had first-hand memories of life under occupation. Papa - Jo's father, a prisoner of war ( POW), who is in a German prison for most of the story and helps Jo smuggle the children to Spain.

The novel is set in the French village of Lescun during the Second World War. Jo Lalande is a young shepherd who is enjoying his childhood; but when his father goes to fight in the war, Jo has to become the man of the house. After an incident with a bear, Jo meets a mysterious man in the forest called Benjamin - a Jew. Benjamin hides Jewish children at the house of the widow Horcada and they then try and get them over the mountain into Spain. But he says in the decades since it was first published, “it’s almost like there has been some sort of cancer in the thinking of people, that this thing seems to rise and rise,” making an adaptation of the book more important than ever. Families can talk about what preteens and teens know about the Holocaust. What upset them in Waiting for Anya? Why? Waiting for Anya is a 2020 historical war drama film co-written and directed by Ben Cookson. It is a film adaptation of the 1990 novel of the same name by Michael Morpurgo. [4] [5] [6]Widow Horcada - A secretive old widow and Benjamin's mother in law. She is grumpy, but has a strong moral code. There is something melodramatic and soapy about this glossy adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s second world war novel for children, the story of a French boy who helps to save Jewish children by smuggling them over the mountains into Spain. The problem, I think, comes from a fear of upsetting its target audience of older kids (the film has a 12A rating). So the tough bits are fuzzily done – at arm’s length and hurried over – making for an oddly flat unemotional watch. The accents don’t help: the actors all speaking English dialogue with ’Allo-’Allo accents (with Jean Reno thrown in for a bit of Gallic authenticity).

The Holocaust, Morpurgo said, was at the forefront of his mind while writing the book as “history, just history from which you must learn.” Jo dras in i en hemlig verksamhet som försöker rädda judiska barn över till Spanien. Samtidigt blir han vän med en av de tyska officerarna som bevakar byn. Jo did not stop until he’d shut the door behind him and even then his heart could not stop pounding in his ears. One year after the war ends Anya eventually reaches the village and is welcomed by her grandmother and Jo.But when a scared girl refuses to leave Benjamin, the plan starts to dramatically unravel and Jo finds that helping the children over the mountain is harder than he ever imagined. Sobering statistics flashing up on screen at the film’s end reveal some 75,000 French Jews were deported to Nazi camps during the Second World War, evoking the extent of collaboration in the country under the Vichy regime. The man asks Jo to forget he ever saw him, but Jo cannot resist finding out who he is. Jo and Rouf follow the man to Madame Horcada's farm. Madame Horcada is a lone figure in this village of companions, an oddity that many of the children fear. Jo is aware of this fear as he peeks inside the kitchen window of her house, attempting to learn who the man is. Just before Jo falls and gives away his presence, Jo learns the man is Benjamin, Madame Horcada's son-in-law. In an age when news is readily accessible, Jewish News provides high-quality content free online and offline, removing any financial barriers to connecting people. A gripping World War II adventure from War Horse author and former Children's Laureate, Michael Morpurgo.

I chose to focus on the positive side,” said the author – whose 2018 book In the Mouth of the Wolf recounts how his uncle, a conscientious objector, came to fight with the French resistance.I didn't realize for a while that it was set in France. That was already a difference, because I haven't read much WWII fiction set in France, and definitely not in such a tiny, out-of-the-way place. It was really cool how the author showed the war slowly spilling over into this remote village. En by i bergen i södra Frankrike, nära gränsen till Spanien. Andra världskriget tränger sig allt närmre. Jo bor med sin mamma, lillasyster och sin farfar. Hans pappa är krigsfånge hos nazisterna.