Here’s more about the film.

If someone told you that there’s a movie about a couple whose child has a fatal brain tumor, you might be thinking it was some sort of sentimental drivel made for Lifetime or the Hallmark Channel. You’d probably also balk at the fact that it’s in French. Imagine having to watch the slow motion suffering of a child through the cold lens of contemporary French cinema’s pretentious sensibilities.

You’d be wrong on both counts. Declaration of War is a movie not about how two parents’ lives are torn apart by the impending death of their child, but how the couple is spurred into action to do whatever they can to not only save the boy, but to make whatever time he has left feel like real living. Real Life is not often fun and sometimes it is unbearable – but even in its worst moments and under its most trying circumstances, it elicits the opposite of surrender. It demands conformation, and confrontation can be wondrous if certain things fall into place.

Starring Valérie Donzelli and Jérémie Elkaïm as a couple whose brief but magical courtship quickly turns into a living nightmare when their son is stricken with cancer, they marshal whatever resources they can to protect their all too young son from a disease that is his life but of which he has almost no understanding. It doesn’t help that the couple’s names are Romeo and Juliette: they joke when they meet that they are destined for tragedy. It turns out to be true, but not the star crossed fate of their more famous literary namesakes. This Romeo and Juliet make it to the altar. They even have offspring. And then it all comes undone.

Or does it? The movie consciously works against the maudlin nature of its subject by focusing instead on the real moments in life – the fears and hopes of every parent for their child, the madness of hospital bureaucracy, and above all, learning to adapt to life’s biggest challenges and changes. No one goes into marriage or parenthood expecting their child to be ripped from their lives – or for that same relationship to be tested by fears of mortality just a few years in. But when such things happen, it’s not that they happen that counts most: it’s how we react to them that matters most.

Everyone falls, the film tells, somewhat preachily. Sometimes we trip on our own accord and sometimes we are pushed down. It’s what we do after the fall that counts.