The dangers of religious and racial intolerance are not something you expect to find being taught in a middle school of an all-white, all-Christian town (pop. 2000) in America’s Bible belt. Yet in 1998, a group of Tennessee students learning about the six million Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust conceived a unique tribute to the dead: collecting one paper clip for every murdered soul.
This inexpertly-crafted yet well-intentioned documentary follows the students and faculty as they amass 29 million paper clips -- donated by Holocaust survivors, members of the public, and celebrities as diverse as President Bush and Tom Hanks -- and set about housing 11 million of them (one for every Jew, homosexual, gypsy and other minority group murdered by the Nazis) in a disused kindertransport train car shipped from Germany.