Schindler's List: what age is it for?
Official US rating: R. In France, zinema would say 14.
Alone, or with you
The official US rating is R, and we never go below it. Alone from 17, and not before, even with an adult.
What it's about
The true story of how businessman Oskar Schindler saved over a thousand Jewish lives from the Nazis while they worked as slaves in his factory during World War II.
Why 17
- The official rating, firstRated R in the US (restricted, under 17 requires an accompanying parent). zinema never goes below the country's rating: it explains it.rule
- Point-blank executions, all the way throughAn engineer shot in the head for saying the foundations were poured wrong, a one-armed man in the snow, a boy who has just been pardoned, prisoners picked off with a rifle from a balcony over morning coffee. The camera does not look away, and it keeps happening throughout the film.shown
- The ghetto liquidation, and the childrenA night of massacre watched from a hill, families split into two lines, children hiding in sewers and under floorboards, a little girl in a red coat. Later, children driven off in trucks while their parents run after them. These are the hardest minutes of the film.shown
- Auschwitz: the selection and the showersWomen sent to the camp by mistake, shaved, stripped, pushed into the showers; a selection where naked prisoners run to prove they can still work; the gas chambers described in whispers in a barracks. None of it is softened.shown
- A tormentor who beats his maidThe camp commandant beats the young Jewish woman who keeps his house, desires her and punishes himself on her. She says calmly that one day he will shoot her. The words are as hard as the blows.said
- Drink, cigarettes, swearing and mistressesSchindler drinks, smokes, seduces; two bedroom scenes, a bare chest, officers who swear. It is the portrait of a man of pleasures, before everything else.shown
What the movie brings
- What the Holocaust was, through faces and names rather than numbers.
- An imperfect man who chooses good: the true story of more than a thousand lives saved.
Watching it together
Watch it together, over two evenings if needed: the ghetto liquidation in the middle of the film and the Auschwitz sequence call for a pause and some words.
at 17 and up
The commandant says power is killing. Schindler answers that power is pardoning. Which of them is right, and which one is afraid?
See the facts
A zinema reading from September 8, 2026 · the whole movie, watched in full · the age by zinema's rules for the US and France, and a human reading · report an error · how this guide is made