For people of a certain age in Europe, World War II and the Nazi-driven Holocaust somehow touched their lives. Lisa Ohlin’s “Simon and the Oaks” (Simon och Ekarna) takes on the war as a sidebar to a boy’s journey into adulthood.

Based on a book by Marianne Fredriksson, the movie begins with a young man on a cliff. Flashing back to the past, we see Simon (Jonatan S. Wachter) as a young dreamy boy, daydreaming of camels as clouds. Fanciful things are hung–pieces of glass. Like many children of a certain age, he feels alienated from his parents. His father Erik (Stefan Godicke) is a solid man, one more used to working with his hands, making boats. They live far away from town, without hot and cold running water or central heating. Simon’s mother, Karin (Helen Sjoholm), encourages Simon’s creative urges, including his desire to attend school in town. His father fears that the school will give Simon airs but there’s more substance to his unease.

At school, Simon is a bit too rustic, a country bumpkin, but he soon finds a friend in Isak (Karl Martin Eriksson), a young Jewish boy who some of the kids at school bully. Simon stands up for Isak. Isak’s father, Ruben (Jan Josef Liefers),  has fled Germany with his troubled wife, leaving behind his true love. Simon is awed by the beautiful rooms, the hot and cold running water and the books, books and more books because Ruben owns a bookstore and lives above in luxury. The flight from Germany left Isak’s mother emotionally crippled and Isak has emotional scars as well.

It’s not Ruben but Erik who helps heal Isak’s anxieties with hard simple work and when Isak’s mother is institutionalized, Isak comes to stay. The two families slowly blend although Erik struggles with his jealousy with Ruben’s wealth and the beautiful expensive gifts he gives Simon.

An older Simon (Bill Skarsgard) grows more estranged with his family but he also experiences a few emotional shocks that I won’t spoil here, but they make him question who he is and feel a more personal connection with the tragedy of the Holocaust. In a way, it shows the seven degrees of connection. If Simon himself wasn’t personally touched, his lifes was still scarred in ways he didn’t know. Isn’t that likely the case with all Europeans and perhaps even Americans.  Sadly, Simon is at a time of peak rebellion, that early 20-something period when your father and mother are always wrong, when his mother dies and that brings him back to the oaks and his personal oak tree that he loved and set him dreaming.

“Simon and the Oaks” is a gentle, touching treatment of coming of age seemingly away from the distant shadow of the Nazi-instigated Holocaust.  “Simon and the Oaks” is playing in Los Angeles at the Landmark.

In Swedish with English subtitles. Based on a best-selling novel of the same name by Marianne Fredriksson.