This is a strange film. It is set as a road story of a traumatised teenager travelling across post-war Europe, with little more than a compass, and with flashbacks to the appalling prison camp he has left, and a beautiful woman, whose identity is never clear until the end. The scenes individually can be attractive and reasonably filmed and there is some excellent music, and a positive message, and so may appeal particularly if you like sentimental encounters.However, unless you can totally disengage your rationality, the chances any of this ever actually happening, or everyone being happily able to communicate in English, are clearly zero, making it impossible to engage with the film. The combination of a wooden David a random selection of encounters, and periodic flashbacks gives the whole film a discontinuity, and although I enjoyed some of the characters and the scenery, overall I felt that the film was poorly produced and failed to respect viewers' common sense (by expecting them to believe the impossible).

Truly one of the most heart warming "victim of war" stories I've read, and to see a movie made from this book was cool. The movie itself was very well done. Although the one thing I do think was not played upon very well/enough was that David never knew anything about anything really since his entire life had pretty much been spent in the camp. So when he saw an orange for the first time.....well you can imagine the description of this unknown object in the book as opposed to what they film portrayed. Little things like this.... the church and Mother Mary, the book he kept seeing and the author, I do suggest reading it and watching the movie as well. Both were excellent. As far as the cinematography goes, in my humble opinion it was well done with riveting scenes atop ocean side cliffs, gardens, the mountains, the camp.. all was so full of details it almost made me loose myself in it like i did when I was a kid watching movies, totally absorbed.

Europe is one of the most complicated places on Earth. There are good countries and there are some bad ones. Set in one notorious police state, is Anne Holm's touching story called " I am David. " He is a Dutch boy (Ben Tibbler) who's parents were arrested and imprisoned when he was too young to remember why. At the age of twelve he is befriended by Johannes (James Caviezel) a fellow prisoner who mentors' the boy in the enduring nature of man as he is growing up amid the cruel, barbarous, atmosphere of a harsh Bulgarian Prison camp. Thereafter he is instructed by 'the man' (Hristo Shopov) who is a sympathetic officer risking all to help the boy. With a knapsack containing a few essentials, the boy narrowly escapes and begins a harrowing thousand mile trek towards his homeland in Denmark. During the arduous journey, the boy reflects on the horrendous treatment he and the other prisoners suffered at the hands of guards. Then too, he slowly realizes the open kindness of others as he makes his way across Europe. Eventually, he meets Sophie (Joan Plowright) a lonely swiss woman who discovers who the boy really is and helps to send him home, but not before allowing her to find a bit of solace in his eyes. The film is a wonderful college of dark images, illuminated by the bright rays of hope and panoramic scenery. Easilly recommended as a movie dedicated to the spiritual humanity of all good people. ****

The historical basis of brutal deprivation and summary shootings in a post-WW2 Bulgarian prison camp is uncertain. Director-actor Paul Feig nonetheless portrays a Nazi-style horror with slave-camp beatings and a summary shooting over a bar of soap. It matters not whether this is Communist or Nazi, it is just evil, out there somewhere.For some unknown reason, one of the psychotics running the camp decides to help a boy (David, Ben Tibber) to escape, giving him his ID papers in an envelope and telling him to take the envelope to Denmark, without telling him why or what it contains. This preposterous premise should signal that we are in a silly scenario that cannot be taken seriously.This is further reinforced when David, who is presumably Danish, has no difficulty communicating with the multiple language-speakers he encounters on his trip. These days, such nonsense could only come from an American, and Paul Feig acts in his own film in the most absurd scene of all, when, playing an English-speaker, he gropes for Italian to talk to David, who has been talking English throughout. Real Europeans now use sub-titles and genuine languages.David's expressionless journey through a non-specific rural Italy into the arms of a non-specific Swiss resident is strictly for the hankie-clutchers who have no disbelief to suspend. I'm afraid mine reared up in outrage when the film showed a uniformed policeman with his cap on in church, something unthinkable that Paul Feig doesn't know, although he was willing to lard the scene with a bellowing church choir, and drape the Swiss village with happy well-adjusted cousins of the Von Trapp family.When David finds a book with his mother's picture on the back and makes a gee-whizz expression we know the resolution is nigh, and with the help of the Swiss national air-line, he is reunited with the bitch who wbo abandoned him in the torture camp, sorry, his ever-loving and faithful mother. Feig is true to style when he shows a seated airplane passenger wearing a fedora. For hankie-clutchers only: normal viewers avoid with care.