Paper Clips review

The humble paper clip has several uses: joining documents, picking locks, cleaning fingernails. Few know, however, that Norwegians wore them on their lapels during World War Two as a secret symbol of resistance against their Nazi occupiers. It’s this that inspired pupils of a rural Tennessee school to collect six million of the buggers to help comprehend the enormity of the Holocaust – an endeavour uncritically celebrated in this mawkish documentary. To be fair, anything that makes rednecks appreciate the wider world is a good thing, but if they’d wanted to study bigotry and intolerance, they could have looked closer to home. (The Klu Klux Klan, we are told, was founded just 100 miles away.) What’s more, housing the surplus stationery in an actual Death Camp cattle car proves that good intentions are no excuse for bad taste.