Au revoir les enfants

At a Catholic boarding school in France under German occupation, a privileged boy named Julien forms a wary, deepening friendship with a new pupil, Jean, who is secretly Jewish and hidden by the priests. Their bond grows just as the war closes in on the school.

Drawn from Louis Malle's own boyhood, the film holds friendship, guilt and irrecoverable loss together, and stands as a study of trauma remembered across a lifetime. For a clinician it shows how a childhood event can be carried, buried and only much later spoken. It won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1987.