Somewhere in Berlin…

Children playing war games among the rubble, soldiers returning home listless and traumatised, a boy tumbling to his death from the shard of a bombed building. It's the same world as Rossellini's Germany Year Zero - but viewed so oppositely that each film seems like a ghastly parody of the other. Lamprecht made the '30s kids' classic Emil and the Detectives, and here his ragamuffins set about putting food on the table and motivating despondent adults with the same vim and resourcefulness that Emil's lot applied to catching a gang of crooks. It's optimistic and inspirational to the same degree that Rossellini's film is bleak and despairing. No one could fail to be irritated by one or the other.