Munich, 17 March 2010. The feature film THE ROUND UP (French original title: LA RAFLE) has racked up fantastic numbers since its start in France, and is already the Number One film in the charts. Directed and written by Roselyne Bosch, the film has pulled in nearly 680,000 viewers in its first five days and boasts an outstanding 1,126 viewers per copy on average.
The gripping, highly emotional film was produced with a budget of 20 million euros. It is a coproduction of Alain Goldman's production company Legende (LA VIE EN ROSE), Gaumont and EOS Entertainment, and stars Jean Reno (DA VINCI CODE, THE PROFESSIONAL) and Melanie Laurent (INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS) in the lead roles. It clearly outperformed Hollywood blockbusters such as SHUTTER ISLAND and GHOSTWRITER, which came in far behind THE ROUND UP as, respectively, Number 2 with 362,000 viewers and Number 3 with 189,000 viewers.
With THE ROUND UP, France is turning for the first time to a darker side of its history, which was long ignored even in France itself: the complicity of the Vichy regime and the active participation of many French people in the deportation of French Jews to Auschwitz. Through the eyes of a group of children, the film relates the dramatic fates of three Jewish families during the Paris roundup of 1942.
In the biggest operation of its kind in France, French policemen systematically combed through Paris neighborhoods and arrested 13,000 Jewish citizens, including 4,000 children. They were all herded into the bicycle racing stadium, the Vélodrome d'Hiver, called Vél d'Hiv, where they were kept in the searing sun for days on end, without food, toilets and practically without water, before they were deported. Director and scriptwriter Roselyne Bosch has based her film on research conducted over many years and on many interviews with contemporary witnesses, such as the now 80-year-old Jo Weismann, who lived through the roundup back then as an 11-year-old.
French media have wholeheartedly acclaimed the film. Le Figaro describes it as a "serious epic, meticulously reconstructed, moving without being weepy." Le Nouvel Obs qualified it as "truly compelling." And La Tribune called the production a "wonderful, necessary film."