Forbidden Games

When five year old Paulette, traumatised by witnessing the violent death of her parents only a short time before and still clutching the corpse of her little dog, appears on the doorstep of the Dollés, the rough, but kindly peasant family take her in. They, too, have an injured family member close to death. As his condition worsens, Paulette forms an intense bond with the family's ten year old son, Michel, and they begin enact secret rituals in an attempt to cope with the reality of loss and death.

Set in 1940 as the Germans march into France, Forbidden Games is an absorbing portrait of the hardscrabble existence of the rural poor, for whom the war only intrudes in the sound of aeroplanes overhead and bombs in the distance. It is also a profound, and profoundly moving, study of the trauma that war visits on those least able to understand it, and has two performances by child actors of uncanny power. [Keir Roper-Caldbeck]