Au revoir les enfants (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Au revoir les enfants which in English means Goodbye, Children is a heartbreaking true story directed by the great French director Louis Malle who based this story on his own painful childhood memories. It tells the story about a young 12 year old boy named Julien who is attending a wealthy provincial Catholic boarding school when one day a new student arrives named Jean. It is of course is natural that the other students pick on the newcomer and once in a while Julien decides to join in. They both learn that they love to read and the two of them begin to bond, but within time Julian learns that Jean is concealing a secret.

Au revoir les enfants is based on the events of director Louis Malle who at age 11 was attending a Roman boarding school near Fontainbleau, in which it was later discovered that his school staff and teachers were secretly taking in Jewish children and hiding them from the Nazis under assumed names. Malle never forgot the day when the Gestapo raided the school and arrested three of the Jewish students and a priest, in which they were rounded up in the courtyard and marched off the grounds; with the priest looking back at the children and saying, "Goodbye, Children." Au revoir les enfants is a heartbreaking story about the horrifying guilt and traumatic pains of a childhood memory, in which a young boy finally makes the horrifying discovery that hate and evil truly do exist in the world.