Distant Journey (1949)

One of the first films to confront the horrors of the Holocaust remains one of the most powerful. Suffused with the visceral dread of a waking nightmare, Distant Journey draws from director and Holocaust survivor Alfréd Radok’s own experiences to tell the story of a Czechoslovak Jewish family—including a young doctor and her gentile husband—whose lives are torn apart by the terrors of the Nazi occupation, leading them to a grim fight for survival in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

Blending expressionistic cinematography with archival documentary footage to potent effect, this harrowing vision of human atrocity was banned in its home country for more than forty years, only to remerge as urgent and impactful as ever.