Distant Journey (film)
| Distant Journey | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Directed by | Alfréd Radok |
| Written by | Erik Kolár and Mojmir Drvota and Alfréd Radok |
| Starring | Blanka Waleská and Otomar Krejča |
| Music by | Jiří Sternwald |
| Cinematography | Josef Střecha |
| Edited by | Jiřina Lukešová |
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Release date
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1949 |
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Running time
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108 minutes |
| Country | Czechoslovakia |
| Language | Czech |
Distant Journey (Czech: Daleká cesta) is a Czech Holocaust film directed by Alfréd Radok and released in March 1949, immediately after World War II. Radok uses experimental cinematography, blending historic footage of the Nazis with a fictional love story between a Jewish woman and her Gentile husband.
Soon after the film's release, Stalinist censorship was implemented in Czechoslovakia. Radok fled to Sweden and Czech filmmakers began their long struggle against strict communist censors. Film production declined, and Distant Journey was banned from audiences only to reemerge over forty years later.
Distant Journey follows Hana, a Jewish eye doctor who falls in love and marries a Gentile named Toník. Their simple love story becomes a nightmare when the government begins the systematized extermination of the Jews. Hana's family is transported to Theresienstadt, and the romance becomes a struggle for survival.
Radok never shows blood or lets a gun fire in his story, but the historic footage he integrates into the film achieves a sense of terror. Newsreel footage and clips from Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will show Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and other Nazi leaders reading speeches while a pile of dead nude bodies on the lawn of a concentration camp enforce the atmosphere of the Holocaust. While the historic war-time footage is shown, the previous scene of the feature film is shrunk to the lower right hand corner of the screen, a picture-in-picture effect comparing the wider global conflict to the more immediate effects on the story's central characters.
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