- Nov 26, 2011
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This movie is based on actual events. A terrible tragedy.
The events take place in occupied Copenhagen in 1945, and God has dropped a pencil.
There are several story threads. One is a boy who witnesses an RAF airplane accidentally strafe and kill a Danish wedding party, striking the boy mute and agoraphobic. He is sent to Copenhagen with his sister to live with his little cousin. The storyline of the two girls trying to help the boy overcome his trauma is very sweet. All the adults tell the boy to snap out of it, but the girls come up with better ideas.
And then there is the self-flagellating oddball nun at a girl's Catholic school. She is having a crisis of faith in the midst of the Nazi occupation, and her way of finding God takes some weird turns.
There is the HIPO collaborator whose father has disowned him. He, too, has his own crisis of faith based on his knowledge the Germans are losing and he is in deep shit when his countrymen get their hands on him.
HIPO (Hilfspolizei) was the German Gestapo's auxiliary police force comprised mostly of Danish collaborators. When the Nazis took over Denmark, they sent the local civil police off to concentration camps. Thus the need for collaborators to fill the gap.
The local citizenry refer to them as HIPO-pigs.
The Gestapo in Copenhagen have converted a Shell Oil building into their HQ. The local resistance has been making a lot of headway and the Nazis spend their days torturing those they have captured. They also have intelligence the RAF is fixing to bomb their building and so they have incarcerated resistance fighters as human shields on the top floor. The RAF is aware of this predicament and decide the human shields must be sacrificed for the greater good.
And so we come to the RAF pilots who know their mission is going to result in the deaths of some good guys. As they fly toward their target, you can see the mental strain they are feeling.
I am not going to spoil the rest of the movie since most people are probably not aware of the outcome of this bombing mission.
Definitely worth watching.
The events take place in occupied Copenhagen in 1945, and God has dropped a pencil.
There are several story threads. One is a boy who witnesses an RAF airplane accidentally strafe and kill a Danish wedding party, striking the boy mute and agoraphobic. He is sent to Copenhagen with his sister to live with his little cousin. The storyline of the two girls trying to help the boy overcome his trauma is very sweet. All the adults tell the boy to snap out of it, but the girls come up with better ideas.
And then there is the self-flagellating oddball nun at a girl's Catholic school. She is having a crisis of faith in the midst of the Nazi occupation, and her way of finding God takes some weird turns.
There is the HIPO collaborator whose father has disowned him. He, too, has his own crisis of faith based on his knowledge the Germans are losing and he is in deep shit when his countrymen get their hands on him.
HIPO (Hilfspolizei) was the German Gestapo's auxiliary police force comprised mostly of Danish collaborators. When the Nazis took over Denmark, they sent the local civil police off to concentration camps. Thus the need for collaborators to fill the gap.
The local citizenry refer to them as HIPO-pigs.
The Gestapo in Copenhagen have converted a Shell Oil building into their HQ. The local resistance has been making a lot of headway and the Nazis spend their days torturing those they have captured. They also have intelligence the RAF is fixing to bomb their building and so they have incarcerated resistance fighters as human shields on the top floor. The RAF is aware of this predicament and decide the human shields must be sacrificed for the greater good.
And so we come to the RAF pilots who know their mission is going to result in the deaths of some good guys. As they fly toward their target, you can see the mental strain they are feeling.
I am not going to spoil the rest of the movie since most people are probably not aware of the outcome of this bombing mission.
Definitely worth watching.
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