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What had the Academy so up in arms they gave this film a Best Documentary Oscar? Well, believe it or not, some 10,000 very such children got the chance of a lifetime: Escape. Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport tells their story, the lucky recipients of a coordinated rescue operation (with the permission of the Third Reich) that removed Jewish and other ethnic children from the ghettos, one boatload at a time.
Through interviews with a scant handful of those who experienced the rescue, we learn of their settlement into homes and hostels, their attempts at integration, and the menial details of their life away from their parents (virtually all of whom were eventually and unfortunately slain).
While it's always tough to criticize a Nazi-era documentary, at the risk of sounding like a cad, I'll go ahead and admit that Into the Arms of Strangers is dreadfully boring and uninspired. Heavy-handed and slow beyond belief (the interview subjects talk slowly, the archival video is in slow motion, everything is slow), the film drags out to a full two hours. While producer Deborah Oppenheimer is obviously vested in the tale (her mother was one of the kinder), she needs to realize that this tangential footnote of WWII is not The Sorrow and the Pity.
From Into the Arms of Strangers.
