The Boat Is Full (1981)
During World War II, Switzerland severely limited refugees: "Our boat is full." A train from Germany halts briefly in an isolated corner of Switzerland. Six people jump off seeking asylum: four Jews, a French child, and a German soldier. They seek temporary refuge with a couple who run a village inn. They pose as a family: the deserter as husband, Judith as his wife, an old man from Vienna as her father, his granddaughter and the French lad, whom they beg to keep silent, as their children. Judith's teenage brother poses as a soldier. The fabrication unravels through chance and the local constable's exact investigation. Whom will the Swiss allow to stay? Who gets deported?
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Such a frustrating disappointment
Good start, but then it gets ruined
In other words,this film is a surreal ride.
At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.
Perhaps if they had added English subtitles to this film and kept its original soundtrack I would have liked it a lot more. But they didn't they dubbed English over the existing film and did a horrible job of it! There is a reason why the practice of overdubbing has been abandoned! The results typically destroy a film (remember all those Japanese Monster films of the 70's) and that is the case here. More so there seems to be a big problem with the translation or even the script I kept thinking did he really say that??? I understand that the film is a "tiny budget" Swiss film from 1981 but film making is an art and this film fails artistically on many levels. It just seemed so amateur.I also get that this was a courageous undertaking by the Director and Producer that angered many Swiss people. They challenge the notion the remembrance of Swiss neutrality showing that it was quite different than what we see at the end of The Sound of Music. More so they illustrate the fact that Switzerland albeit neutral was in fact subservient to the Germans.This is a film that can generate conversation thus I give it a couple of extra stars but as a film goes it stinks! 6/10
The anxiety of an attack from Hitler-Germany was real in Switzerland during WW II. Why should Hilter not integrate German-speaking Switzerland into his "Reich" to which already belonged Germany and Austria? After all, the "Grossdeutsches Reich" was based on the common language spoken, so Northern Switzerland was considered once lost from the "Grossreich" like Mussolini considered the Italian speaking parts of Southern Switzerland as "terre irridente". Why Hitler did not conquer Switzerland stays one of the big enigmas of history up to today.The Swiss population that lived close to the German border - in "Das Boot ist voll" it is Siblingen, Canton of Scaffusia - realized much more of what is going on on the other side of the river Rhein. Everyday immigrants crossed the Swiss border illegally. However, what did "illegal" mean in regard of immigrant-laws that had become criminal themselves? That the population must have reacted confused when it was confronted actually with a group of immigrants like the six persons in the movie, is clear. The wish to help them hide and feed them went along with the fear to be detected and to go to prison. The boat was not full, of course, and the title of the movie is cynically meant, but Switzerland did not want to provoke Germany by giving their Jewish population asylum.I think, films like "The Boat is Full" are necessary, but not because Switzerland had loaded more guilt upon herself than other states during WW II did. The opposite is true. But Switzerland had started to construct a very strange self-image of alleged neutrality and interwoven it with her history back to Wilhelm Tell which consists exclusively of fairy-tales. Middle-aged people like me still had to learn in school that a handful of Swiss soldiers defeated "the Habsburgian army" in "battles" whose names do not even occur in Austrian history and are not even to find in Swiss geographic maps.
I hated most of the characters in this movie. I hated the ending. I had trouble sleeping after I saw the film. A movie that affected me this much, must be brilliant. It is! In all its aspects. Simple storytelling at its best. A shame, and a sin, that it is all true. And you know it cuts right to the bone, after you become aware, as to how the movie was shunned in Switzerland, and how all but one print of the film managed to survive, after its initial release. Thank you, thank you, thank you, to the filmmakers and actors that made the Boat is Full, a reality. I have seen quite a few films, relating to the Holocast, and this is by far the the most horrific. As I said before, simple, yet effective.
Good span of characters, the movie lacks another storyline other than the couple hiding the refugees (and a little more, too little). It's too long for the little story it holds, while it does hint the characters have some more in them. Well acted, touching and haunting, is does light a different angle about Switzerland's neutrality- still being unraveled today in the news.