Operation Save The Children

Nominated for:Best Documentary

Film Info

Film Year: 2018

Film Duration: 60 min

Country: France

Director

Jean-Charles Lassus

Film Category
Synopsis

Red Barnet (the Danish branch of the English charity Save the Children) was created on March 14th, 1945, in a country that emerged relatively unscathed from the war. In the following years Denmark set up an unprecedented operation to help young victims of the war: between 1945 and 51, 21,000 children from 6 to 12–among the most fragile–were able to benefit from three-month stays in foster homes in Denmark. They traveled in trains through a devastated Europe and a destroyed Germany. It took them several days from Austria, Poland, Italy, France, Hungary, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Greece, Romania, Luxembourg, Finland, Norway and Germany. Director Jean-Charles Lassus came across amazing and unpublished 8-mm-footage documenting this operation. Intertwining this extraordinary material with moving interviews of some of these children he tracked down, he offers us here an amazing documentary full of emotion and hope.