The Boat Is Full, which won numerous international awards including an Academy Award nomination here, was the subject of considerable controversy in Switzerland. Director Markus Imhoof is both outraged and outspoken about his country's supposed ‘neutrality' during World War II, a stance which in fact allowed thousands of Jews to die at the hands of the Nazis. “The boat is full” was a Swiss government euphemism for a 1942 decision to shut its borders to Jewish refugees fleeing for their lives from Germany. But Imhoof's treatment deals less with public policy than with private complicity--with village-wide cowardice as well as isolated acts of courage, and with the unpredictable changeability between the two. The story involves six refugees--five Jews and a German dissident soldier--who are strangers to one another until they decide to pose as a family in order to slide through the border on a technical exception to the immigration ban. They are taken in by a reluctant farmer and his wife, who slowly grow used to the idea that the fugitive “family” are not criminals. But the deception lasts only a short time before, as Imhoof puts it, “the homeland reasserts itself and the homeless pay with their lives.” In her book Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, Annette Insdorf notes that “Imhoof's direction is sober, perhaps reflecting his immersion in Brecht's writings.... His refusal of facile emotion can be seen in the film's total lack of music and in its understated acting.... As Renoir so succinctly put it, ‘The more emotional the material, the less emotional the treatment.'”