Last night as a member of Amnesty International, which benefitted from ticket sales, I attended the world premiere of the new film The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. The story has become already extremely popular through the book of the same name on which it is based, written by John Boyne. Both the author and director Mark Herman said a few words.
Shooting from one of the hardest-hitting angles on the implications of the Holocaust, it is based on the accidental stolen friendship that develops between the spoilt 8-year-old son of one of the soldiers running a nearby concentration camp, and a Jewish boy of the same age who meets him at the edge of the barbed-wire fence around that same camp. The unsentimental denouement sends the message that insofar as we treat other people inhumanely, in some way or another we do it to ourselves too.
The outstanding thought is how easily a similar scenario could be imagined between a prosperous Israeli child and an insecure Palestinian boy at the wall recently built between the borders of those two unharmonious states. Both the tensions between neighbours, and the legacy of German atrocities, were daringly and maturely explored in Eytan Fox's 2004 Walk on Water, starring Lior Ashkenazi and written by Gal Uchovsky.
A full house in the Savoy cinema, Dublin, applauded the well-crafted screening of this anti-discrimination script. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas was a good choice of partner for Amnesty who deserve the spoils for their work at the forefront of resisting complacency.
- goinghome
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