The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

Here are the notes I wrote before seeing the film:

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

UK/USA 2008 (94 minutes)
Director: Mark Herman
Starring: Asa Butterfield, Jack Scanlon, David Thewliss and Vera Framiga

Awards and Nominations
Two wins and five nominations including:
* Vera Franiga won the Best Actress Award and Mark Herman was nominated as Best Director at the British Independent Film Awards
* Joint Winner (with Slumdog Millionaire) of the Audience Award at the Chicago Film Festival

Bruno (Asa Butterfield) is living a comfortable life in Berlin during the Second World War but things change for the worse when his family has to move to the country: his father (David Thewliss) is a high ranking Nazi SS officer and his new posting is as commandant of a concentration camp. In his innocence Bruno sees the camp as a “farm”, and after initially wondering why the inhabitants all wear striped pyjamas he makes friends with a young Jewish boy of his own age who lives in the camp.

The film is based on the book of the same name by John Boyne, who described his story as a parable rather than historical fiction. But Boyne’s choice of the Holocaust as background to his novel was bound to provoke strong reactions: one reviewer questioned the overall premise of the story, claiming that there were no nine year old boys in Auschwitz as the Nazis killed all those not old enough to work. But on this specific point Boyne is close to the truth: records from Auschwitz registered that in January 1944 there were 773 male children under the age of 15 living in the camp and some were used as messengers, although it is impossible to forget the enormous numbers of other children who died in the gas chambers every day.

The film produced similarly mixed reactions from its audiences, with a tranche of good reviews praising its fidelity to the source novel and its avoidance of a clichéd ending, but with a dissenting critic who while accepting the power of the film described it as a Hollywood version of the Holocaust, literally a Disneyfication.

Mark Herman first came to prominence as writer and director of films like Brassed Off (1996) and Little Voice (1998). John Boyne is a graduate of the school of Creative Writing at UEA and has written eight other novels, although none has matched the success of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas which to date has sold more than five million copies worldwide.


Even though I knew the story the film was just as powerful as I had expected it to be, and the audience left in almost complete silence.