A documentary by Joe Fab and Elliot Berlin. Rated PG. For showtimes, please see page 80

The lightweight paper clip achieves gravitas in Joe Fab and Elliot Berlin's film about the Whitwell middle-school Holocaust project. Whitwell, Tennessee, population 1,600, is a homogenous Christian community. In 1998, principal Linda Hooper set out to teach the children tolerance by having them study the Holocaust. Upon discovering that Norwegians wore paper clips on their clothing during the Second World War to represent opposition to Nazism and anti-Semitism, the kids started a letter-writing campaign to collect as many paper clips as there were individuals exterminated in the death camps. Once the national media relayed the students' initiative, the school was inundated with 29 million clips.

As heartbreaking as it is uplifting, Paper Clips is still too long, its power diluted by much lingering over pails full of clips and children silently opening envelopes. I wanted to be invited into the messy kitchens, family dynamics, and locked diaries of those thoughtful students whose prejudices were obliterated by their participation in the project. Instead, they remained hesitant talking heads. Testimonials from the two teachers involved as to their own newfound tolerance were moving but repetitious almost to the point of self-congratulation. The emotional wallop of Paper Clips comes when Holocaust survivors visit the tiny Tennessee community and tell, in halting voices, their personal stories. It's devastating. Their grief is impossible to follow.

The anticlimactic remainder of the film, focusing on the school's efforts to acquire an authentic German railcar to house the paper-clip memorial, felt like filler. Utterly lost on me was the appropriateness of the symbolism in laying to rest the 11 million paper clips, representing the souls of those persons exterminated, in the very cattle car that delivered many to their deaths.

This, combined with some hand-on-heart USA flag-waving so we know it wasn't just Whitwell but America itself, God bless her, that spearheaded the project, may test viewers' own tolerance.