Distant Journey

Distant Journey is a Czech Holocaust film directed by Alfréd Radok and released in 1949, not long 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. The film was not allowed to have a premiere in Prague. It was only shown in small theatres outside of Prague until it was banned completely. Summary 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 grounds 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.