Drama · War
French (Jeux interdits)
1952 · Directed by René Clément · 87 min
France, June 1940. A five-year-old girl is separated from her parents in the chaos of the German advance and taken in by a farming family in the countryside. She forms a close bond with the family's youngest son, and the two children invent a private world. The tone is tender, unsentimental and often darkly comic.
Why it matters in cinema history
A defining French film of the early 1950s, and a key example of the "tradition of quality" literary cinema that the New Wave later attacked. It also helped establish the child's-eye war story as an international genre.
Watch with intention
Watch how the film keeps the camera, and the emotional logic, at the children's eye level while the adults stay slightly absurd.
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