One Day You’ll Understand

Paris, 1987. As the trial of Lyon’s Gestapo head Klaus Barbie plays out on television, French businessman Victor Bastien (Hippolyte Girardot) finds himself distracted from his work and increasingly obsessed with piecing together the truth about his family’s history. As he sorts through photographs, letters and memorabilia, the documents he discovers – including an Aryan declaration written by his father – tell of the fate that befell his parents during the war, and he is quick to rush to judgment. But to his frustration, his mother Rivka (Jeanne Moreau) has shuttered away her past and refuses to share any memories with him.

With tensions growing between Victor and his sister Tania (Dominique Blanc) – who defends their father’s declaration and mother’s silence – his wife (Emmanuelle Devos) and children accompany him on a visit to the tiny village where Rivka’s parents were forced to hide during the war. And as Victor finally begins to reconcile himself with his family’s fate, Rivka makes the decision to confide her past to the members of her family who may have a chance at shaping the future.

“A remarkable film...no living filmmaker has [Gitaï’s] extraordinary formal command of the medium, and he produces half a dozen scenes here that are among the best I’ve seen in any motion picture all year. In Jeanne Moreau, Hippolyte Girardot, Dominique Blanc and Emmanuelle Devos, it has four of the finest actors in recent French history, and the intimate, indirect portrait they create of a loving family constrained by silence is magnificent.” (Andrew O’Hehir, Salon)

A “subtle, contemplative exploration of memory and loss...[Moreau] gives a master class in how to be regal without vanity and how to use the hard-won charisma of a movie star to illuminate the dignity of an ordinary person.” (A.O. Scott, New York Times)

Five out of six stars; a “diligently understated exploration of the legacy of anti-Semitism in a mixed-religion, middle-class French family.” (Mark Holcomb, Time Out New York)

“Masterly...touches the deepest wellsprings of emotion. This is perhaps the film Gitaï was born to make, a masterpiece of Holocaust memory that uses not one frame of footage from the disaster.” (Piers Handling, Toronto International Film Festival)