Fantastic!

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Producing a film about Nazi Germany is easy and difficult at the same time. It is easy because many viewers are well-informed about the dramatic period in Germany's history, making the viewers' emotional involvement not too difficult. You don't name your son Adolf.It is difficult because clichés are so easy to produce. The classical black-white versions of evil Germans versus glorious Allied forces is an obvious trap.None of this in this film. It follows loosely a true story of a Jewish youngster hiding as a member of the Hitlerjugend - the Nazi youth movement. On top of his puberty, he has to face an identity crisis due to his choices to survive. Other interesting parts of the story are a homosexual German soldier, a girl overly committed to her country and a Polish boy fighting for his catholic religion in communist Poland.The way a part of difficult history books is mixed into the movie deserves to be mentioned, as well as the music. Sometimes though, overacting takes the upper hand.But the fact remains that showing the true horror of the atrocities committed during that period is not fit for film, even in this German co-production, as only very few would be able to watch it.However, it's still a very interesting film to watch.

The film starts off with two boys underwater. Solomon is about to turn 13 years old and celebrate his bar mitzvah, but Kristallnacht happens. His sister is killed while his family's home and store is vandalized. The rest of the family decides to flee to the father's native Poland. Here they are safe until war breaks out. Solomon and his brother are sent east by their father to flee. Here they are separated, but Solomon ends up in a Russian orphanage. Things go relatively well for Solomon who receives education in the orphanage and joins the Komsomol. When Hitler breaks his pact and invades the USSR, Solomon flees once again, this time with the rest of the orphanage. As he and the orphanage escape he is separated and captured by the Germans. Here he uses his knowledge of Russian, Polish and German to impersonate a Volksdeutscher. Through a stroke of a luck and the protection of another German soldier, he's able to remain safe and learn how to be a soldier in the German army. In a a battle his comrades are killed and, while deserting. it is assumed he is revealing a hidden Russian position. This leads him a captain to adopt him and send him west where he will enroll in an elite Hitler Youth School. Here he mostly deals with being a normal teenager and hiding his identity and circumcision. When he is about to be discovered, the Russians destroy the office where he is to verify his German purity. When the Russians finally advance, he deserts and, with the help of his surviving brother Isaak, is able to give up his hoax and rejoin his Jewish brethren. The film does a good job of showing dreams to help get into the psyche of Solomon, while the whole films feels like a real Greek drama like the Odyssey. Solomon is always off to some new place coming through mainly by luck. I especially like the reference that Hitler was himself a Jew in hiding. This helps bring the analogy that it may be better to die for one's belief, than live and hide them. Certainly it is a debate better conduced by Holocaust survivors than myself, but respecting the fact that the stories of Jews, Poles, Russians and even Germans were all different. It even posits, as Solomon's linguistic skills in battle, that perhaps a Jew is more German than some of the Volksdeutsch who were merely German by blood and not the merit that helped to actually save lives.I was completely mesmerized by all the characters. Each one enabled me to really feel and I go into it. I'd like to move away from WW2 in German cinema, but films of this caliber are hard to ignore.

This international co-production (Germany, France, Poland) unfolds a real story of Solomon Perel, a German Jewish boy whose most teen and youth years remained under the oppression of both Nazis and Soviets, mostly during World War II (1938-1944). Being a Jew was "non-welcome" in both dictatorships, under Nazi rule, however, it was oppressed and punished directly, thus Solomon had to become Jozef and became an elite "Aryan" German to almost all around him. Thanks to enormous luck, knowledge of languages and desire for survival, he managed to stay alive in different places and rules (by the way, he is still alive, although was born in 1925!).All this is aptly depicted, and despite the tragic background, there are several absurd, hearty and even comic moments in his unwanted journey between Berlin, Lodz and Grodno, reflecting the fast changes of that period (no wonder that the film won the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film and was nominated for the Academy Award: Best Writing Adapted Screenplay). The cast is even and plausible as well, particularly Marco Hofschneider as Solomon/Jozef who is always visible. Perel appears briefly as himself in the finale.A good and versatile film (there are not too many dealing with events both in the Soviet and Nazi regimes), but the non-original title referring to Europe is confusing, providing a distorted and/or uninviting picture about the real nature of the film.

Europa Europa is the remarkable true story of Salomon Perel, a young teenage Polish Jew, who passed himself off as, not merely German, but also, as a member of the highest order of the Hitler Youth, while all the time sticking to his Judaic roots, in order to survive the war. The storytelling aspects of the film gives this it drive and purpose and are excellent - based on Perel's extraordinary autobiography it avoids extrapolation and sticks to his tale.It scores very high in two vital aspects - one, the script is superb, (It was Oscar nominated) and two it was shot in German which given it subject matter was no small achievement.The film is well directed, though because of it's use of studio lighting and bright colors it has not aged as well as some of the Holocaust corpus.There are perhaps better films and books that express the absolute evil of the death camps, Weisel and Levi being two prime examples in authorship, but this is a unique perspective as it is not centered on the Shoah but rather on the unique conundrum of daring to survive by living in the heart of the Nazis' twisted dream, and one definitely worth your time - it is a truly fascinating true story with some strong adventure and drama elements.