大象传媒

Paper Clips, we are told in an opening voiceover, is about "a journey that begins in the mind and ends in the heart". The story that unfolds certainly lives up to this mawkish statement. Chronicling a school project to commemorate the Holocaust, Elliot Berlin and Joe Fab's documentary does all it can to garner an emotional response from the viewer. That it fails is less to do with its teenage subjects' admirable intentions than its gross sentimentality and thudding lack of subtlety.

In 1998, one bright spark at Whitwell Middle School, Tennessee, had the idea of collecting one paper clip for every victim of Hitler's Final Solution. (The notion wasn't entirely his: said stationery item had been used in Second World War Norway as a secret symbol of Nazi resistance.) Thanks to coverage from NBC and the participation of Tom 'Happy Days' Bosley, the pupils ended up with eleven million of the blighters - not to mention a genuine Death Camp cattle car to store them in, now the site of a permanent Holocaust memorial.

"GROSS SENTIMENTALITY AND THUDDING LACK OF SUBTLETY"

Egged on by formidable school principal Linda Hooper, the enterprise represents a beacon of tolerance and understanding in what had been the heartland of American bigotry. (The Ku Klux Klan, we learn, was set up just a few miles away.) What gets lost amid the tearful back-slapping and self-congratulation that dominates this film, however, are the individual histories behind those six million loops of metal, along with a solitary voice questioning the wisdom and propriety of such a patently simplistic exercise.