Diamonds of the Night (1964)

Interesting facts

Diamonds of the Night is a 1964 Czech film about two boys on the run from a train taking them to a concentration camp, based loosely on Arnošt Lustig's autobiographical novel Darkness Has No Shadow. It was director Jan Němec's first feature film.

Production

In 1942, at age 15, Arnošt Lustig, a Czech Jew, was sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. He was later transferred to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. In 1945, he and another young man escaped from a train carrying them to Dachau when it was attacked by an American aircraft.

Němec's influences for the film include the early films of Luis Buñuel, Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (1956), the films of Alain Resnais, and the writing of William Faulkner. Antonín Kumbera, a Roma railway worker, was cast after Němec saw him in Evald Schorm's short documentary Railwaymen (Czech: Železničáři) (1963). The other lead actor, Ladislav Jánský, was a photographer and occasional actor.

In the middle of production on the film, cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera left to accept an award at a film festival in South America. The rest of the film was shot by Miroslav Ondříček. The opening tracking shot, for which both men were present, was the longest in the Czechoslovak cinema's history and cost a third of the film's budget.

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