Lore (Cate Shortland, 2012)

As the war ends, an adolescent girl is left looking after her four younger siblings when their Nazi parents flee from Allied arrest. A trek across the whole of Germany begins towards the refuge of their grandmother's house. This is doomed to end almost before it has started, were it not for the help of a young man who reveals himself to have been in the concentration camps.
While it's true that the amount of potential material generated by the events of the time is almost limitless, the number of new angles on the human tragedy for all concerned and hand-wringing for Germans in particular is starting to run low. So do a British writer and Australian director bring anything new to the table? Certainly, the emphasis is necessarily less on regional detail and more on a sort of universal landscape, with repeated cutaways of impassive nature bringing Roeg's Walkabout to mind, while also, if one is being generous to the conceit, alluding almost hallucinatorily to the disconnection the children have with their fragmented land. But the makers' outsider status is also a weakness: the main character, Lore, spends almost the whole film still in the grip of her Hitler Youth indoctrination and when she does break out at last against the older generation who are still in denial, it's with a petulance that ill suits her meta-role as the symbol of a national sea-change. Her lack of maturity directly reflects a lack of authorial familiarity with the territory, something you would never find with a considered German reflection on the same. Whether this naivety is ultimately a good thing too is quite open to debate.

6/10