Julia Jarmond (Kristin Scott Thomas) is an American journalist living and working for a magazine in Paris. Her editor assigns her to cover the 60th anniversary of the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup in 1942 where the French police herded up 13,000 Jews in the city, imprisoned them in a stadium, and then shipped all the adults off to Auschwitz. In the course of her research, Julia discovers that her French husband's parents owned an apartment where one of these Jewish families lived in 1942.

In a flashback to that fatal year, we meet ten-year-old Sarah (Melusine Mayance) who lives with her parents and younger brother. When the police show up in the middle of the night, she impulsively locks the boy in a cupboard believing that they will return home shortly. Sarah promises to free him as soon as she can.

But her plan is upended when her family is taken with thousands of other Jewish men, women, and children to an indoor cycle track where they are kept for days without food or toilet facilities in an overcrowded space. The men are separated from their families and then the women. All the adults are shipped to Auschwitz. Sarah manages to escape and is befriended by another young girl. Eventually, they are given sanctuary by an elderly French couple. Throughout her struggle for survival, Sarah's spirits are dragged down by her guilt over not keeping her promise and saving her brother.

Sarah's Key is directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner from a screenplay based on the novel by Tatiana de Rosnay. The drama in this absorbing film is intensified by Julia's complete immersion in Sarah's story and her commitment to telling the raw truth about what happened to her. In the process, the journalist's marriage is rocked and she clashes with Sarah's son (Aidan Quinn) who has a much different perspective on his mother than the one presented by Julia.

Once again we see that the past can be a spiritual teacher if we open our hearts and minds. Sarah's Key also reminds us of something we need to remember from the poet Muriel Rukeyser: "The universe is made of stories, not of atoms."


Special features on the DVD include the making of Sarah's Key.