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In the winter of 1940 a twelve-year-old boy named Luo and a thirteen-year-old girl named Chuchu, both from China, and taken to the Ivanov International School in Moscow. The principal does not want them (it is two months into the school year) and the children do not speak Russian, but they are left there anyway. There is, however, at least one other child in the school from China and the two new students soon begin to adjust to their new environment. This is a war tragedy due to the circumstances which brought the children to the school even before the war directly affects the school. Early in the movie Chuchu describes in detail how her father was executed. The actress did a wonderful job portraying the emotions in this scene as did the actors portraying the students and teachers listening.
In the Autumn of 1941 the school is evacuated due to the war and by this time several students are already in German hands, including Chuchu. Many of the boys, including Lou and some very young boys, want to stay and fight instead of leaving with the principle. Even one girl is caught dressed as a soldier trying to get onto a troop truck. From here the actions in the movie descend into violence and terror, including mass killing of unarmed men women and children.
The movie continues to follow the plight of Chuchu and Lou. What I have described so far are early developments setting up the main portion of the movie. I don't want to give too much away from this point on, so as not to spoil the movie for anyone, but a few things I want to vaguely reference as points of interest are: Luo's strange way of handling a job of delivering death notices to the families of dead soldiers; Luo's interesting way of fighting the Germans; and finally, the tattoo shown on the DVD cover has an important part to play in the plight of Chuchu.
I loved the movie. The plot was strong and well defined, the acting in the movie is excellent, and the characters are well developed. And even though the movie is about war, and includes a great deal of killing, it walks a fine line of not totally skipping it, yet not getting too vivid.
One final thing on a lighter note I will bring up before closing. Before the terror of war really sets in there is one really funny scene (in contrast to the rest of the movie which is anything but funny). This might be a minor spoiler but only minor because you will really have go see it to appreciate how funny this scene is. The school has a bath house which is separate from the other buildings. It is a loosely constructed wooden structure with a center wall which does not go all the way to the ceiling, but high enough the children cannot see over it. The boys shower on one side of the wall and the girls on the other, each side has its own entrance. The children begin horsing around, throwing and spraying water over the wall at the other group. The boys especially are throwing pans of water over the wall. However, unknown to the boys, while they are refilling their pans the girls get dressed and leave very quickly. One of the women who works at the school (a large woman called to Aunt Tonya) enters the bath house as the girls are leaving. While Aunt Tonya is undressing the boys make one last effort to simultaneously throw several pans of water over the wall. They hit the wall and it falls, followed by the whole loosely constructed building. There are about a dozen boys and about a dozen girls seen nude in this sequence, Aunt Tonya is the only one involved in this who is not seen nude.
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