E-Mail This Article to a Friend PAPER CLIPS

It might have been a fascinating subject for a documentary: the eighth-grade class of a school in Whitwell, Tennessee (a community of 2000, predominantly white and Christian), decides to study the Holocaust and create a commemorative art project. Spurred by the little-known fact that paper clips represented a secret sign worn by supporters of victims of the Nazis, the students decide to attempt, via grassroots appeals, to amass nine million of them. The response and its effect upon the community are indeed remarkable. The students enlist two savvy and lovable German journalists to expand the scope of their project, and eventually the project is widely publicized and celebrated. But directors Elliot Berlin and Joe Fab have made Paper Clips a self-congratulatory, ingenuous, and smarmy portrait of a small-town America that had apparently never heard of, much less considered, the Holocaust. The extemporaneous words of students are moving, as are their encounters with actual survivors, but there are so many egregiously scripted and gratuitously choreographed moments that this film can serve as an example of how not to make a documentary. (82 minutes)