Holocaust Memorial Day: Distant Journey

Organised in collaboration with the Czech Centre London to mark the International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Alfréd Radok’s debut still gives a unique answer to the question of how to express the inexpressible. The film does not translate the horror of the Terezín prison directly, but through a comparison of the different visions that shaped the realities of the Holocaust. The multilayered art report therefore combines a melodramatic story, echoes of expressionism and a self-reflective play with documentary and fiction. The goal of this digital restoration was to make the film available in a form similar to how audiences would have seen it at the time of its initial release in 1949. As a result, we have preserved various visual elements that originated during the film’s shooting process or its laboratory processing, as evidence of the technologies and creative approaches of the time. The source materials for the digitization came from the Národní filmový archiv, Prague. Both sound and image were digitized from the duplicate positive preserved in the archive. The restoration was carried out in 2019 at the Universal Productions Partners studio in Prague, under the supervision of the Národní filmový archiv, Prague.