19th Portland Jewish Film Festival
ARMY OF CRIME
DIRECTOR: ROBERT GUÉDIGUIAN
FRANCE, 2009
Guédiguian’s taut, heroic thriller, set in 1943, is based on the true story of a group of working-class immigrants (Poles, Jews, Romanians, Spaniards, Italians) who risked their lives during the French Resistance. Led by idealistic Armenian poet Missak Manouchian and his French wife, the independent group of 22 assassins and saboteurs plot against the German occupiers and the Vichy government, who respond with an equally vicious campaign to characterize the Resistance as “an army of crime” conspiring against French life and the sovereignty of France and to extinguish their ranks. (139 mins.)