The Round Up

An account of the Vel' d'Hiv round-up in Paris on 16 and 17 July 1942, when French police, acting on German orders, arrested more than thirteen thousand Jews, most of whom were held in a cycling stadium. More than four thousand of them were children. The film rests largely on the record. The director Roselyne Bosch wrote the script from survivors' testimony and documents of the period, and most of its characters are based on real people. The narrative turns around a child, Joseph Weismann, who did survive and described what happened years later. The passages inside the velodrome are the centre: no water, no lavatories, a glass roof, and thousands of people held for days in the July heat. Jean Reno plays a doctor, Mélanie Laurent a volunteer nurse and Gad Elmaleh a father. It reached a wide audience in France and reopened public argument about the event; the French state's responsibility for the round-up went officially unacknowledged for a long time. Important for anyone who likes historical drama and films drawn from record. For a viewer troubled by emotional steering, the film does it openly, through its score and its scenes with children.