In the spring of 1992, I participated in an exchange between my school at the Lycée-Collège Gambetta in Arras in the Nord Pas de Calais. The Lycée-Collège today is shown in the pair of pictures below: pretty much the same but the trees have grown bigger!

I was, I think, twelve years old at the time and I had very little knowledge of French (my current French still leaves a lot to be desired, of course, despite daily use). The trip was a bit traumatic, what with the queasy ferry crossing and videos like Aliens playing on the bus telly.

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Vimy and Arras

A trip down memory lane, chez les Ch'ti. I was last in this area in 1992 and now in 2009, I can't remember a thing!

It was far more traumatic for my French opposite number on the UK leg, though. Within just a few hours of being in the UK, he ended up in hospital.

I still don’t know if the poor fellow went through that windscreen because he’d momentarily forgotten to cycle on the left side of the road.

Anyway, I was back in Arras seventeen years later, slightly irritated because nothing much looked familiar. It had been the same story for J in Boulogne-sur-Mer, of course, but I thought I’d have been able to do better.

Arras is looking a bit frayed around the edges these days, like a lot of the Nord-Ch’ti towns. The old Flemish places are thronged by kebab joints and pound shops.

A top down Jaguar with Dutch plates passes through, its driver looking a bit bemused – this isn’t what he’d expected. Nor was it what we’d expected either.

Vimy Ridge

The school exchange bus brought us here too, where the struggles of 1917 are marked by a dignified monument in white Croatian stone, a rabble of boys and girls with a wide variety of levels of personal hygiene and acne affliction.

And a funny thing happened that day on Vimy Ridge, in bright sunshine and cold air. I think it started among the girls – of course it did – someone started crying and it started everyone off. They refused to get off the bus and visit the memorial.

None the wiser, the Canadian guide led a smaller group around the trenches which were and are creatively preserved using concrete cast in the shape of sandbags.

The Canadians captured the ridge over the course of three days in April 1917 in a successful attack based on good planning and considerable innovation. Since it had been the first battle in which Canadian forces had operated as a complete corps, it holds great significance for the nation.

• Director: Joe Wright
• United Kingdom, 2007
• 

When a young girl uses a series of events to doom the romance of the housekeeper’s son and her elder sister, the course of each of their lives is changed beyond foresight. So goes the story of Atonement, an adaptation of Ian McEwan’s manipulative novel by upcoming British director Joe Wright.

Whilst the first act concentrates on the minute tensions of a pre-war country residence, the remaining drama unfolds on a much broader and more popular canvas set among the young nurses of London’s war effort and the British Expeditionary Force’s evacuation of Dunkirk.

Though our three protagonists comfortably succeed in displacing themselves to a new time and place, the film as a whole still feels unbalanced when detailed portraits are swapped for sweeping landscapes. When all is finally explained with a typical McEwan twist in the dénouement, this beautifully shot, seriously acted film rather struggles for credibility like a swan taking flight.

• Director: Stefan Ruzowitzky
• Austria, 2007
• 

A busy master forger, Salomon Sorowitsch is a man with little concern for political ideals. And that’s what keeps him alive when war breaks out and he ends up in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Receiving preferential treatment to other prisoners, Sorowitsch is given the task of forging the currency that will keep the Nazi war effort alive and ruin the Allies’ economies. Put simply, it’s a case of “(y)our money or your life”.

The balance of principles and survival adds massively to the tension of the movie. We are never left in any doubt that Sorowitsch and his colleagues are moments from the same fate as those over the wall. As a result the film feels much weightier than its mere 98 minutes.

Karl Markovics is an agreeably grim Sorowitsch. An opportunist with few redeeming features, but in the circumstances, we still find ourselves rooting for him even though other characters perhaps deserve more regard. Sachsenhausen is certainly no place for lofty words, yet oddly it brings Sorowitsch a sort of redemption.

• Director: Michael Curtiz
• United States, 1942
• 

Casablanca needs no introduction, except maybe the first few bars of As Time Goes By. It’s a masterfully told, elliptical yarn about a difficult period and after so many decades, it’s too easy to overlook the fact that it was contemporary to those times.

Bogart’s world weary ex-pat Rick Blaine runs an upmarket club frequented by a microcosm of affluent refugees, shysters and officials. A past lover who jilted Rick in Paris arrives with her Resistance leader husband of whom Rick was hitherto unaware. Should Rick help them escape Europe or try to regain her love and elope?

A relatively small cast ensures that character development is evenly spread and the plotting is detailed without being overly elaborate. Every aspect of the production is consistently excellent. As such, we can think of Casablanca as a self-contained capsule of cinematic perfection whose longevity has stretched far beyond the era of propaganda movies.

• Director: Paul Verhoeven
• Netherlands, 1977
• 

Verhoeven’s revisionist wartime drama is a bittersweet story of five student dandies who each face the subjugation of their country in different ways. The film displays a sensitivity that’s missing in the director’s Hollywood oeuvre.

Soldier of Orange would still be an effective ensemble piece without the outstanding performances put in by Rutger Hauer and Jeroen Krabbé, oscillating unnervingly between humour and horror.

Verhoeven’s visual interpretation of Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema’s book was also informed by personal experience, and he may draw on this resource once more in the forthcoming Black Book, his first Dutch film for 21 years.

• Director: Park Chan Wook
• Korea, 2000
• 

For those who argued that the North/South tensions depicted in Shiri(1999) took second place to a daft Bond-esque tech-fluff plot, JSA (Joint Security Area) succeeds in approaching the borderline. This hype enabled the movie to do brisk business when I was living in Korea.

For Park, who has since turned out some stunning – and subtler – essays in style, JSA was an opportunity to explore the sometimes bizarre realities of life at the DMZ.

The result is highly effective as classic Korean melodrama – Kang Ho Song shines again – but the bilingual scenes have all the truth of Cold War propaganda.

• Director: Je Gyu Kang
• Korea, 2004
• 

An epic saga of two brothers caught up in the Korean War, this film demonstrates the Korean sensibility for well-crafted melodrama.

What’s unusual, however, is the sheer scale of the production. Taegukgi was the most expensive movie ever to come out of Korea and the mission, led by Shiri director Kang with his crack squad of filmmakers, is very much accomplished.

Comparisons with Saving Private Ryan are inevitable, with a human interest storyline and the similar use of flashback storytelling, bleached photography and handheld cameras. Nevertheless the Korean effort, made for just $3.5m, is visceral and more evenly paced, making it easier to forgive the occasional lapse into sentimental opera.