Forbidden Games

Director: René Clément

1952 / 86min / 4K DCP

France, 1940. Five-year-old Paulette (Brigitte Fossey), orphaned by a German air strike while fleeing Paris with her parents, finds shelter with a peasant family and, in their 11-year-old son, Michel (Georges Poujouly), a confidante, the two together creating a world of their own. Profoundly moving while never mawkish, with Fossey’s performance one of the most riveting and guileless ever given by a child actor. “Clémént’s beautiful, lacerating film on the themes of innocence, Christianity, war, and death… [His] method of presentation [is] a series of harsh contrasts, with on the one side the intuitive, lyric understanding between the two children, and on the other the ludicrous comedy of the quarrelsome, ignorant peasant adults.” —Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

Distributor: Rialto Pictures

Part of Maybe If You Smile They Will One Day All Return