The Palm Beach Post from West Palm Beach, Florida • Page 229

I WINNER ACADEMY AWARDS INCLUDING BEST PICTURE BEST ACTRESS JESSICA TANDY 3 ERNEST GOES TO JAIL Pi I LOVE YOU TO DEATH i JOE VS THE VOLCANO PRETTY WOMAN i 4 I CRYMBYki! mm 'iniMUUIIU L.TI1LULT thou Ml I IIL- --1 mi mw- iwuu. ww.i" jmi i in" HOUSE PARTY MY LEFT FOOT i TO BEST LIST Including -Carol Buckl.nd, CNN TV Roger Elwrt, SISKEL EBF.RT -DennisCanninglum, WCBS-TV -Goj Flatltj, COSMOPOLITAN I LOVE YOU TO DEATH I Jewish and Christian youngsters play during the winter of 1944 in Nazi-occupied France, as shown in 'Weapons of the Weapons of the Spirit' a triumph of humanity 1 THE FIRST POWER HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER pc PRETTY WOMAN i CRYBABY mi OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS pen snmo TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES pc 1 1 W-c Tmm himt MISS DAISY PC Movie Review V2 WEAPONS OF THE SPIRIT CREDITS: A documentary written, produced and directed by Pierre Sauvage. 91 minutes. NOT RATED NOW PLAYING: Shadowood 12. By MICHAEL MILLS Palm Beach Post Staff Writer Imagine: You are a peasant farmer with barely enough to feed your family.

Strangers arrive in your village people with whom you have little in common. Some are from foreign lands, speaking alien tongues. Their religion and culture differ drastically from yours. These outsiders are the target of a campaign that aims to destroy them. Their very presence is a threat to your safety.

Yet you take them in as if they were your kin. You feed and clothe them. You smuggle some of them out of the country. You lie to officials who come in search of them. This is exactly what the 5,000 residents of Le Chambon-sur-Lig-non, a mountain village in central France, did during World War II.

Their efforts saved 5,000 European Jews from annihilation. The quiet courage of this astonishing community is the subject of Weapons of the Spirit, a deeply moving 1986 documentary and perhaps the most inspirational account of the Holocaust ever filmed. On one level the movie is a personal odyssey for its makeif Pierre Sauvage, born to an exiled Jewish couple in Le Chambon. Like so many of the Jews who survived thanks to the village, his family fled when the war was over, hoping to leave the traumatic past behind. Sauvage returned, partly to trace his origins, but mainly to unravel the mystery of how this town played such an important part in saving so many lives.

In technique, Weapons of the Spirit is a traditional documentary, assembled with period photographs and interviews with the villagers and the Jews they sheltered combined with Sauvage's narration. In content, the movie is a haunt-ingly beautiful testament to every- I II IfWf 9 9 0 LmnMiirniiiTffi raFaotasnja Productions thing that is noble about the human spirit. What Sauvage found is that the citizens of Le Chambon helped those in need simply because it was the right thing to do. Most were descendants of Huguenots early French Protestants long persecuted by their Catholic countrymen who knew all too well the cost of being different. But let them speak for themselves: "I helped simply because they needed to be helped." "Your faith is in vain if works don't follow." "It all happened very simply.

We didn't ask ourselves why we were doing it. It was the human thing to do." A stirring fictional counterpart to Weapons of the Spirit survives. The great writer-philosopher Albert Camus lived in Le Chambon during the war. There he wrote The Plague, a novel inspired by the events he witnessed. A quote from the novel opens the film: "There always comes a time in history when the person who dares to say that two plus two equals four is punished by death.

And the issue is not what reward or what punishment will be the outcome of that reasoning. The issue is simply whether or not two plus two equals four." Le Chambon demonstrated, in heroic fashion, that two plus two indeed equals four. i Page 8 The Palm Beach Post APRIL 6, 1990 TGIF.