Filhos da Guerra

Hallmark's sentimental touch has never been more appropriate than for this story of a Polish nurse that saved the life of 2500 Jewish children during WWII. Anna Paquin (BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE) is quickly becoming the Queen of TV movies. Her performance here is amazing. Marcia Gay Harden, who plays her equally brave mother, also gives a fine performance. The editing is quite sharp. The violent scenes, like the Gestapo's torture scenes, are jarring to say the least. I was expecting a female version of SCHINDLER'S LIST but after the film was over I could not help but compare this story to THE HIDING PLACE. Irena Sendler is a worthy heroine in the same league as Corrie Ten Boom. Some viewers might think "Enough already" with these kind of stories but when they are as good as this I will respond "Keep them coming!"

A very fine holocaust film dealing with Irena Sendler's helping 2,500 Jewish children escape from the ghetto and face certain extermination.

The film is quite a change for Anna Paquin, who shows she can act unlike her 1993 totally undeserved supporting Oscar win for "The Piano."

This excellent film shall serve as an inspiration to us all. Unfortunately, we could not discover what happened to many of the children after the war. Unfortunately, their parents must have perished.

This is a film of great virtue, moral courage, the embodiment of a total triumph of the human spirit under such adversity.

Marcia Gay Harden, a terrific actress, has the role of the mother. Despite the fact that her part is generally understated, Harden displays that rare virtue of a parent caught up in what is right in such an era of horror.

Highly recommended.

I usually find Hallmark movies a bit schmaltzy, but the inclusion of Anna Paquin convinced me to give this a try. I'm glad I did. This was excellent, well-paced, and suspenseful. The character portraits were succinct but rich, and I found myself caring about what happened to everyone, which is quite a feat for a two-hour TV movie.

I won't give the plot away, but considering it's a WW2 movie about sneaking Jewish children out of a ghetto, you can probably guess where it's going.

Production values were excellent. It felt more like a feature than a TV movie. Give it a try.

I knew very little about Irena Sendler before watching this movie. But after seeing it, I simply feel ashamed that we don't know more about the real heroes of the Second World War Although many already figured out, this is a true story about a young Polish woman's and fellow brave Warsaw citizens, passionately engaged in helping thousands of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto during the German occupation of Poland. With such a powerful, dreadful story behind, it is really hard to make a movie that won't be touching, but The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler is much more than that. It start a bit slower, drawing the terrible conditions of Warsaw Ghetto, while we watch how the monstrous "Final Solution" for extermination of Jewish people taking its full strength. From the second half, movie is gaining on speed and intensity and really nail the watcher to the chair until the very end. The crew is very good, lead by wonderful Anna Paquin, who marvelously portrayed extremely courageous and bit dreamy Polish girl.

As one of the reviewers already said - this is not a typical Hallmarks movie, but certainly the great one. And I really recommend it for watching, if not more to the honor of braves such Irena Senler was.

I found this movie a worthwhile watch. Over the years I've done a fair bit of reading about the Second World War, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust - but until now I've never heard of Irena Spendler. Her story is worth knowing, and is reasonably portrayed (albeit in a kind of bare bones fashion) by this made for TV movie. Anna Paquin put on a solid performance in the title role. Irena was a Polish social worker in Nazi- occupied Warsaw who worked in the Jewish Ghetto, and became determined to save the Jewish children who were there. In the end, by smuggling them out of the Ghetto and placing them with willing Polish families, 2500 children were saved.

This lacks the sustained intensity of "Schindler's List." For probably three-quarters of the movie, although the conditions of the Ghetto are portrayed as dreadful, the threat from the Germans seems muted and distant, albeit it ever present. Having said that, the intensity of the movie increases dramatically after Irena is arrested by the Gestapo, and the scenes in which she's tortured are quite unnervingly realistic. A nice touch at the movie's end was a few brief words from the real Irena Spendler, who died in 2008.

For those interested in this period of history, this is a worthwhile movie - not the best of the Holocaust-themed movies, but certainly a good one.