Recently I saw a screening of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” which is set to come out in November. It’s one of those movies you are “glad you saw” though you would struggle to say you enjoyed it. While not quite as captivating as Hotel Rwanda, it’s along those same lines of enjoyment. You’re glad you saw it though calling it entertaining seems wrong.

Though a Holocaust movie, the story really isn’t about the people in the camps quite like Schindler’s List. Instead, the movie is from the perspective of an 8 year old boy whose father is the commandant of Auschwitz. If you like to use movies to connect with your youth group students, this is definitely a film which would generate some discussion afterwards. It would seem a powerful discussion topic after the movie would be about our perspective on life and how sometimes we only see what others want us to see and not the truth. In this case, young Bruno was largely shielded from the realities of the genocide that happened just past the wall of back garden.

Here’s a great description of the movie.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a fictional story that offers a unique perspective on how prejudice, hatred and violence affect innocent people, particularly children, during wartime. Through the lens of an eight-year-old boy largely shielded from the reality of World War II, we witness a forbidden friendship that forms between Bruno, the son of Nazi commandant, and Schmuel, a Jewish boy held captive in a concentration camp. Though the two are separated physically by a barbed wire fence, their lives become inescapably intertwined.