Diamonds of the Night, based on an autobiographical story Darkness Casts No Shadow by Arnošt Lustig, a Holocaust survivor, started the career of one of the most original Czech filmmakers of the 1960s, Jan Němec. It tells the story of two teenage Jewish men who escape from a train that is taking them to a concentration camp. Moving freely between the present, fantasies and flashbacks, Němec employs an aesthetic of Pure Cinema to depict the state of the distressed human mind. The elliptic editing, minimalist sound (with almost no dialogue) and hallucinatory compositions free it from realism and turn it into a visceral sensory experience.

Subtitles: HR