Sarah's Key

The film is adapted from Tatiana de Rosnay's 2006 novel, but it is rooted in a real atrocity: the Vél' d'Hiv Roundup in Paris in July 1942. French police, acting under German orders, arrested roughly 13,000 Jews, including about 4,000 children, who were held in inhumane conditions at the Vélodrome d'Hiver before deportation.

Kristin Scott Thomas leads the cast as Julia Jarmond, an American journalist in present-day Paris investigating the roundup. The parallel storyline follows young Sarah Starzynski, whose attempt to protect her brother in 1942 drives the mystery.

It was the July 1942 mass arrest of Jews in Paris by French police under Nazi occupation, named for the cycling stadium where families were imprisoned without water or sanitation. The film helped popularize awareness of an event France did not officially acknowledge for decades.

The 2010 film, directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner, preserves the novel's dual-timeline structure, cutting between Sarah's 1942 ordeal and Julia's modern investigation. It compresses some of the book's later subplots, but the central revelation about Sarah's fate remains the emotional core.