Synopsis
Train of Life (Train de vie, 1998) is a Franco-Romanian tragicomedy you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Radu Mihăileanu. Summer 1941. The village fool Schlomo runs into a small Jewish shtetl with word that the Nazis are coming. The community hatches a plan so absurd it might work: build a fake deportation train, dress some villagers as guards, and ride all the way to Palestine.
What follows is months of chaotic preparation — learning German, shaving off beards, arguing about who plays the prisoner and who plays the officer. The village communists want to hold elections in the cattle car. There is bickering, love, and constant improvisation. Mihăileanu keeps the comedy dark and the dread close; you laugh and then remember what this plan is running from.
The film took a special jury prize at the 1999 Berlin International Film Festival and remains one of European cinema's most singular responses to the Holocaust. Stream Train of Life (1998) online on iFILM.
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