January 4, 2024 (International)
October 4, 2024 (United States)
White Bird (marketed with the subtitle A Wonder Story) is a 2024 American war drama film directed by Marc Forster from a screenplay by Mark Bomback, based on the 2019 graphic novel by R. J. Palacio. Serving as both a prequel and sequel to Wonder, the film stars Ariella Glaser, Orlando Schwerdt, Bryce Gheisar, Gillian Anderson, and Helen Mirren, with Gheisar reprising his role as Julian from Wonder.
White Bird was released in Italy, Slovenia, and Croatia on January 4, 2024; it was released in the United States by Lionsgate on October 4, 2024.
Storyline[]
After the events of Wonder, Julian has left Beecher Prep for good. He is visited by his grandmother, Sara, from Paris, who, in response to Julian's reflection about his need to be socially passive in order to fit in at his new school, tells him about her childhood as a young Jewish girl in Nazi-occupied France during World War II.
In 1942, Sara evades being rounded up by the Gestapo and spends more than one year being hidden by her classmate Julien (one of whose legs is congenitally paralysed by poliomyelitis) in a barn of the house where he lives with his parents. She is instructed never to leave the barn so as not to be discovered by the neighbours suspected of being Gestapo or Milice informers. At night, Julien teaches Sara what he has learned at school during the day. Affection between them eventually grows into love.
In 1944 after the liberation of Monte Cassino, Julien is arrested by the Milice on his way to school at a checkpoint and thrown into the back of a lorry for transportation to a remote camp in the mountains. During an escape attempt by the other prisoners, he is shot dead. At the end of the war, Sara is reunited with her father, but she finds out that her mother has been killed at Auschwitz.