In 1942, the young Jewish girl Misha (Mathilde Goffart), her Russian mother Gerusha (Yaël Abecassis) and her German father Reuven (Benno Fürmann) hide from the Germans in a small house in Ardennes, Belgium. Misha is very connected to her mother that advises her that if one day a person comes to her saying "love of my life", she would follow him or her without any question. When her parents are captured by the Nazis, Misha is delivered to a German family and the abusive matriarch gives a bad treatment to the girl. However, she finds support in the family of Ernest and his deranged wife Marthe that supplies groceries to foster family. Misha loves Ernest's dogs and the old man gives a compass to her and tells that her parents have been sent to East to forced labor. When the old couple is denounced for sheltering the girl and arrested by the Germans, Misha flees through the woods heading east. Along her journey seeking out her parents, she lives and survives with pack of wolves and crosses Germany, Poland reaching Ukraine. When she sees that Brussels have been released by the allied force, she returns to her hometown and reaches it in March 1945 almost dead, sick and with lice and malnourished. However, Ernest identifies the girl that does not accept that her parents had died in the concentration camp of Sonnenburg.
"Survivre avec les Loups" is an amazing journey of a little Jewish girl trying to find her parents that have been sent to the concentration camp of Słońsk (Sonnenburg). Despite the fraud of the author Misha Defonseca that fabricated her autobiography and confessed on 29 February 2008 that her memoirs is a hoax, the film is engaging the same way the also fictional "I Am David" is. The cinematography is awesome and a star is born with the top-notch performance of the girl Mathilde Goffart. Shame on you, Misha Defonseca! But congratulations to the director and screenwriter Véra Belmont and the stunning cast and crew for this magnificent feature. My vote is eight.
Title (Brazil): "Sobrevivendo com Lobos" ("Surviving with Wolves")
