Czech Film Fund Supports the Script of The Terezin Gravediggers

September 3, 2014

Our wonderful feature-length documentary with animations, The Terezin Gravediggers, received development support from the Czech State Cinema Fund. Authors Olga Strusková and Pavel Koutský should present the final version of the script till the beginning of 2015. We are currently in discussions with several potential foreign coproducers and hope to complete the film in the year 2016.

The film tells a chilling story of how 30 prisoners of the Nazis held at Terezin (then in Czechoslovakia) were forced to dig a common grave for all male victims of the tragic massacre of the entire village of Lidice in 1942. This was another example of Hitler’s brutal methods of absolute control. The film makes use of the little-known facts surrounding the massacre of Lidice using the parallel story of those thirty Terezin prisoners to clarify the events of the Lidice tragedy and the ways used by the Nazis to obliterate all memory of this tiny village which dared to fight back. The film cries out for people, especially young people, not only in the Czech Republic but in the whole world, to remember where racial intolerance and neo-Nazism, now a growing movement in Europe, can lead.