The Windermere Children

August 1945. Three hundred children are flown to England. All of them survived the camps and most could find nobody from their families. They are settled at an estate on the shore of Lake Windermere. The programme is to last four months. Nobody quite knows what to do; nothing of this scale had been attempted. A psychologist comes and tries to get the children to talk. They do not talk. Then there is football, painting and swimming. Some of them hide food at night. Lists for tracing families go up and every list means another loss. Michael Samuels directs. Thomas Kretschmann, Romola Garai, Iain Glen and Tim McInnerny are in the cast. It is a British production, made for television. Its ground is real; the programme set up for the children brought to Windermere in 1945 is a known piece of history. The film mostly used inexperienced actors for the children. The matter it treats is how recovery does not happen; the programme offers no solution and the film does not hide that. The narrative does not dwell on the children's past; there is no camp scene and it looks at what came after. At the end there is footage of the real people today and some of them tell their own stories. The narrative criticises the British authorities as well; the programme was kept short and no support followed. Its limit is the production; the television scale shows, the narrative is in pieces, and there are too many characters. Who it is for: viewers who like drama drawn from real events and postwar narratives. Who it is not for: it is heavy, episodic, and the ending sad.