La Rafile -- "The Round-Up" -- opens at the Quad Cinema on Thirteenth Street just east of Sixth Avenue on Friday, November 16. Roselyne Bosch's hard-hitting 2010 movie depicts the despicable behavior of the French gendarmes and officials who collaborated enthusiastically with the Nazis in deporting numerous Jewish chldren to their deaths. "For decades, the official line of successive French governments was that the deportations were entirely the fault of the Germans, assisted, perhaps, by the collaborationist Vichy regime," Menachem Z. Rosensaft writes in the Washington Post blog. "It was not until July of 1995 that the newly elected French President Jacques Chirac set the record straight and confessed his nation’s 'collective error.' Speaking on the 53rd anniversary of the Vel d’Hiv roundup, he said that 'France, the homeland of the Enlightenment and of the rights of man, a land of welcome and asylum, on that day committed the irreparable. Breaking its word, it handed those who were under its protection over to their executioners.'” The film -- in French, German, and Yiddish, with English subtitles -- centers on several of the Jewish children, svereal of whom escaped, and the Protestant nurse who aided them. Jean Reno and Mélanie Laurent star. The movie was a box office hit in France two years ago.
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On Sunday, November 11, there will be a special screening of a documentary about George Plimpton at the School of Visual Arts theatre on West 23rd Street. Harvard graduate Plimpton founded The Paris Review in 1953 and remained at the helm of the groundbreaking journal until he died in his sleep fifty years later. Plimpton, an inventive, risk-taking editor, was also a terrific writer and journalist, who invented participatory journalism -- detailing his exploits playing footnall with the Detroit Lions, golf with professionals, and boxing with Archie Moore. In 1985 he (and Sports Illustrated) sprang a delicious April Fool's hoax involving Sidd Finch, involving a pitcher with a 150-mph fastball. Plimpton, a peerless toastmaster and host, threw memorable parties at his Manhattan townhouse on East 72nd Street. He also acted in movies -- such as Oliver Stone's Nixon. The Paris Review is offering discounted tickets to the screening. -- DL
