Maybe If You Smile, They Will One Day All Return

A line from Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s “Lullaby of a Palestinian Child” provides the title for this series, which brings together war films that have little-to-no-time to dedicate to battlefield heroics, exploring instead the effects that military decisions made in the corridors of power have on children with no say in the matter. Featuring films from North Vietnam (Hải Ninh’s The Little Girl of Hanoi), the former Czechoslovakia (Karel Kachyňa’s Long Live the Republic!), West Germany (Volker Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum), and Japan (Hiroshi Shimizu’s Children of the Beehive and Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies), as well as other points scattered around the globe, the scope of this series attests to the terrible universality of the understanding that unites them: that in war, the small and the helpless suffer most awfully and needlessly.