“You must remember who you are,” a mother tells her daughter as she leaves the nest. In so many other films this would be an inspirational touchstone, the guiding light for a child thrown into the adult world all too soon. “There’s no place like home” comes to mind. Yet Lore, Australian director Cate Shortland‘s powerful sophomore feature, gives us no such comfort. The mother offering the advice is a woman on the run, her husband a high-ranking Nazi officer wanted by the Americans. It is the spring of 1945, Hitler is dead, and European identity has never been more fluid or fragile. Hannelore (Saskia Rosendahl) is the eldest of five children, now left without parents as World War Two comes to a chaotic and violent conclusion. Beside her is younger sister Liesel, twin boys Günther and Jürgen, and baby Peter. Lore’s only option is to lead them 900 kilometers north from the Black Forest to their grandmother’s home in Husum, crossing three borders that did not exist just a few months before. These children, products of the Hitler Youth and their parents’ fervently Fascist generation, step into the tumultuous partition of their country as everything they have ever known and believed in comes crashing down.