When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (Als Hitler das rosa Kaninchen stahl, 2019) is a German-Swiss family drama by Caroline Link you can watch online on iFILM. It is early 1933. Arthur Kemper, a Jewish journalist played by Oliver Masucci, slips out of Berlin days before Hitler's election result. His wife and two children — twelve-year-old Max and nine-year-old Anna — follow within weeks, taking almost nothing.

Riva Krymalowski plays Anna, and the film belongs entirely to her. Switzerland, then France, then England: Anna adapts to each country with the particular resilience of children who have no choice, picking up French at school while her parents worry about money and permits and whether they will ever go home. The pink rabbit, a stuffed toy left behind in Berlin, stands for everything that cannot travel with a family on the run.

Link adapted Judith Kerr's 1971 autobiographical novel — Anna Kemper is Kerr herself. What makes the film work is its refusal to play the story as catastrophe: for Anna, it is simply life, strange and sometimes painful and occasionally wonderful. Link previously claimed the Oscar for Nowhere in Africa (2001), and that same unhurried attention to German history shapes this film too. Stream When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (2019) on iFILM.