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ALL MY LOVED ONES Send This Review to a Friend
The knowledge of what happened to Jews during the Holocaust underlies every moment of "All My Loved Ones," a Czech drama set in the fateful year of 1938 and starting just before Hitler gobbled up Czechoslovakia and World War II was imminent. It is told from the perspective of the lone survivor of a family, with fiction meeting reality as the British man who in real life saved some 664 Jewish children by arranging their transport from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia to England is honored in a televised ceremony. Filmmaker Matej Minac, inspired by events that engulfed his own family and working from a screenplay by Jiri Hubac, has done an effective job of creating a well-cast drama that captures the difficult to-flee-or-not-to-flee decisions that faced those under threat.
While framed around the achievements of Nicholas Winton (Rupert Graves), an English stockbroker with a determination to do what was right, the film is mostly concerned with painting a portrait of one family, in particular the young boy who will be the rescued one and who, by means of a narration, looks back on those years. As a child he is concerned with what children normally think about--getting to the stage of wearing long pants and enjoying the pretty girl playmate who has become part of his young life.
But it is an adult perspective that governs the action, and the story is often told with the kind of exuberance to be found in many Czech movies. This jaunty quality, visually and story-wise, wraps the film in humanity even while the deck is being stacked against the Silbersteins. At times slow motion sequences threaten to make the film too artsy, but these moments are mercifully few.
Josef Abrhám plays Dr. Jakub Silberstein, the boy's father and household head who stubbornly refuses to leave and at first doesn't want to send his son to England. Among his brothers is Samuel, played by Jiri Bartoska, a concert violinist, whose plan to marry a non-Jewish young woman is approved by his doubtful father only to be thwarted by her father when the discrimination against Jews tightens. Sam becomes increasingly trapped and despondent. Other members of this tightly knit family are also depicted to round out the portrait of the Silbersteins. We've seen similar films, including Vittorio De Sica's brilliant 1971 "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis," set in Italy. No matter. "All My loved Ones" has its own dynamics and is tied to the marvel of the rescue of more fortunate children who escaped the fate of those left behind.
Stories bearing on the Holocaust cannot be told too often. A Northern Arts Entertainment release.
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