The movie "One day, everything will be fine." This line contains infinite hope, but it is full of pain and heartbreak.
The movie begins with single-parent brothers Eric and Elmer being sent to a local school for troubled children because their mother is seriously ill. Their uncle said it was "the best school in the country".
Before leaving, Mom said to them, "Come back for Christmas."
In this way, the two brothers began an unexpected life in this "best school".
"What do you want to be when you grow up," the principal asked Elmer, the younger of the two brothers, at lunch.
Elmer, the younger brother with deformed feet, said: "Astronaut" .
Elmer, who had finished talking about his dream, was suddenly slapped hard by the dean next to him. The principal said to Elmer, "Pride can't achieve anything, let's be realistic."
Elmer, who was suddenly beaten, stayed where he was, while the new female teacher watched the students being beaten, and seemed to want to say something, but she was hesitant to say anything.
The principal explained his educational philosophy to the female teacher: "These boys come here because no one can discipline them. It is our responsibility to help them, even with fists, only in this way can they be obedient."
At the moment, the female teacher expressed her understanding, but she still insisted:
This school is a cruel micro-society. Boys have their own class, and they are victims of bullying and indifference. The strong bully the weak, and the old bully the newcomer.
Elmer was also bullied because he said that he wanted to be an astronaut. His brother was pushed to the ground by a group of people, and Elmer was forced to climb the water tower. Stones pelted him, as if to laugh at him, against his ridiculous astronaut dreams.
The principal and the teacher were brutal. The brothers tried to escape on the first night, but were caught and returned to the school. In order to punish them, the principal ordered all the children to line up and beat the two of them in turn.
There is also a wretched dormitory teacher. Whenever he is on the night shift, he will be like a "chosen concubine", picking one of all the children who are pleasing to the eye and dragging them to his room for sexual assault. If the child resists, he will be beaten and obeyed.
One of the details was particularly shocking, when his brother Elmer was found wet by his teacher, and the boys began to coax and demand punishment.
In a louder shout, the boy who was raped last night also walked into the crowd, with hatred and anger on his face, and followed the crowd to demand punishment for Elmer, as if this would transfer the suffering to the more vulnerable, It seems that as long as other people suffer as well, I feel less pain. The only warmth in the film comes from the female teacher who still has principles. He discovered his younger brother Elmer's reading talent and made him do the job of delivering letters relatively easily.
One day, little Elmer asked the female teacher, do you have children?
She said she had hoped to become a mother, but had an accident before her child was born and has been childless since.
The female teacher was nice to Elmer, getting him news about space, helping him send letters to his family, etc. But that didn't make things better. Suddenly one day at dinner, the bad news came that the mother of the two brothers died of a serious illness.
Overwhelmed by the sudden grief, the two began to cry uncontrollably. The brothers lost not only their mother, but also the chance to leave this hell.
Never going back to spend Christmas together again.
However, the headmaster brutally wanted to maintain the order of "no talking during meals". He pressed his brother's face to the plate and ordered them to stop crying and continue eating.
In the end, it was the female teacher's comfort that calmed them down, but the female teacher failed to protect the two brothers all the time.
The two brothers were overwhelmed and decided to run away again, but they were caught again because of an accident. The younger brother Elmer thought it was the female teacher who betrayed him and thought she and the principal were in a group.
The desperate younger brother said to the teacher: "You are just like them. I am glad you don't have children. Children will never like you."
Elmer's words angered the teacher who had always wanted to be a mother, and she finally couldn't bear it anymore and slapped Elmer. At this moment, she confirmed what Elmer said, she really became "just like them".
Shame, guilt and anger at his own incompetence flashed across the face of the teacher who was standing there. The next day, she resigned, and the only warmth in the whole school disappeared.
For a long time, the female teacher turned a blind eye to the violence on campus. She thought that she could not change anything by herself, so she deceived herself and hypnotized herself: "As long as I don't beat the children, I am still innocent."
But in fact, there is no boundary between condoning violence and inflicting violence.
As the days passed, my brother Eric still had a glimmer of hope. He heard from other boys that they could leave the school at the age of 15, so he tried his best to please the principal and hoped to take his brother away with him. But the headmaster's backsliding angered him.
In a fit of anger, Eric scratched the principal's car with a wire, was severely injured and fell unconscious. The headmaster chose to cover up this atrocity again, and tried to seal Elmer's mouth and make his brother Eric disappear into the world.
Elmer held back his grief and used it to win a day off from the principal, and went to Copenhagen to seek help from the female teacher and the Education Bureau. His actions became the key to saving everyone later.
In the scene where Elmer goes to ask for help, we follow him and see the sunny, clean and peaceful streets of Copenhagen city. People enjoy a free and happy life.
However, in places where the sun does not shine, the atrocities and sufferings such a child (group) is suffering are unknown.
The complaint at the Education Bureau did not go well, they failed to meet the prosecutor, and the female teacher said to Elmer as he drove him back in the car: "I'll be waiting here today, and when the prosecutor comes back, we'll be there to save him. You, Elmer, don't give up."
Bathed in the warm sunshine of Copenhagen, Elmer's heart has long been dead. He didn't say goodbye, because he no longer expected to see any more hope in that hellish school.
He went back to school, holding his unconscious brother's hand, and said: "It wasn't going well in Copenhagen, but I knew what I was going to do. I had no fear. The astronauts didn't know what to do before they opened the hatch. What happens, but it takes courage to try."
Wearing his own space suit, he smashed the principal's car into a smash. It seems that only in this way can it really attract attention and hope to really overthrow the principal's rule.
Just when the principal who came over was about to hit him, he was called away by the prosecutor of the Education Bureau. The prosecutor said that he and the female teacher were on their way to the school and they must see Elmer and his brother Eric.
The principal hurried back to the scene, but Elmer had been beaten unconscious by the dean,
A desperate Elmer, unaware that someone was coming to his rescue, struggled to run out to the water tower where he had been bullied before, and climbed up.
In a trance, Elmer looked at the moon in the distance, thinking about his astronaut dream of landing on the moon, thinking about his lifeless status and the terrible treatment he would receive if he was caught.
He leaps and the movie turns to slow motion, as if Elmer really turned into an astronaut, flying towards the moon he loves. Vaguely, he saw his dead mother and his brother who was seriously injured in bed.
The hurried female teacher just caught up with the scene where Elmer fell from the air. It seems that the small body that fell from his eyes at this moment shattered her cowardice and dare not act.
For the film itself, it has a rather warm ending. The female teacher did not choose to escape this time, but testified to the Education Bureau for all the evil deeds of this school. The principal and teachers were suspended for investigation, and the children finally escaped from hell.
Later, the teacher stayed in the hospital until the doctor told her that the children would recover. She breathed a sigh of relief, and the tears flowed uncontrollably.
The doctor mistook her for the mother of the two brothers, and before she could refute, she walked into the ward with this honor that fell from the sky.
When she entered the ward, she was still nervous and kept looking at the two children lying on the hospital bed. Seeing that they seemed to be sleeping peacefully as the doctor said, the heart that had been hanging all the time really slowly fell to the ground.
Then she gently moved the chair between the two beds, and slowly sat down.
This scene, this back view, represents the end of the film, and also represents that the cowardly woman at the beginning of the film who had lost her child and turned a blind eye to the violence in the school really grew into a mother.
At the end of the film, that line of stinging words reappears: based on true events.
In the film, the principal started serving in the school in 1949, and the story in the film took place in 1969. After 20 years of rule, how many children his atrocities have harmed, what kind of adults they have grown into, and what kind of pain they have experienced in the rest of their lives, people can't imagine.
I don't know where in the world the same story is still happening.
At the beginning of the film, other children kindly reminded the two brothers that there is a unique "law of survival" in school, that they must turn themselves into "ghosts", abandon their thoughts, and abandon their feelings.
Maybe being ghosts will allow children to survive in a hellish environment. They are beaten to the point of submission and dehumanization. They are like the learned helplessness experiment, who thinks that no matter how hard they try, they can't escape the electric shock. Like a dog of fate, he endured it silently.
Perhaps, the real world is more cruel, not everyone can meet the female teacher, and not everyone can be rescued in the end.
They waited so desperately, saying to themselves, as repeatedly mentioned in the movie:
"One day, everything will pass."
"One day, everything will be fine."
In the end, little Elmer no longer looked forward to the arrival of "one day". The space suit he made was like his armor, and he finally flew out of the dark cage.
The female teacher no longer expects "someone will stand up one day", but is determined to stand up against her former boss, and finally save all the children.
The words "one day" seem to be full of hope, but they are also full of despair that they dare not act.
After watching the movie with a heavy heart, I also asked myself two questions:
One day, why not today?
There's always someone trying to change this, why not me?
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