Director Mark Herman, brings a movie together here that left me very very sad!
Based on the book by John Boyne
Its about a german family at the time of WW2, the Father being a high ranking nazi,very stern and ambitious.
The father gets a promotion from work and he and his family move homes from their lovely family home in Berlin to a huge house in the countryside that resembles a prison, fences surround it and guards patrol it.
Bruno is the 9 year old son and he and his older sister have no friends at all, this doesn't seem to bother his sister as she herself begins to get into the nazi scene with posters in her room and the way she speaks.
The family are not aware that behind their house is a concentration camp which the father runs! (Auschwitz)
The film is seen through the eyes of Bruno how bored he is at the new house with so many new rules and being ordered he must never go to the back of the garden! His mother warns him not to, without knowing herself what lies behind their own back garden!
Fed up with his home tutoring Bruno decides to go wondering where he has been told not to go! He comes to huge fence and there he meets a little boy sat in striped pyjamas, called Schmuel the same age as himself, they strike up a friendship neither one of them knowing what actual seperates them! and how different their lives are.
This story is wonderfully told and leaves you thinking about those poor people that actually went through that!
I think the ending was a bit predictable I saw it coming but still harrowing.
A great and brave movie based on the Holocaust, I would say on the same level as Schindlers list.
Left me feeling very sad and now i want to read the book.