Film Forum

3:20 ONLY

(1949, Alfréd Radok) Prague, 1941. In one of the first films about the Holocaust — made when the events were still in recent memory — Jewish doctor Blanka Waleská marries her Gentile colleague, their wedding party soon followed by the guests' deportation to the Theresienstadt ghetto and camp. Both a love story and an indictment of Czech anti-Semitism, blending classical and experimental filmmaking, along with a striking use of newsreel footage and Nazi propaganda. Effectively banned during the Stalinist regime, it was later embraced by Czech New Wave filmmakers of the 1960s. DCP. Approx. 103 min. In Czech, with English subtitles.

4K Restoration overseen by the Czech Film Archive.

Presented with support from the Joan S. Constantiner Fund for Jewish and Holocaust Films.

A JANUS FILMS RELEASE

Reviews

Read J. Hoberman’s review in Tablet.

“A MASTERPIECE WITH THE AUDACITY OF ORSON WELLES… distinctively Czech — or at least Kafkaesque.”
– J. Hoberman, Village Voice

“Filled with looming angles and outsize shadows… A long scene in which the camera prowls around the baroque clutter of a warehouse crammed with confiscated Jewish property cannot but evoke the last shots of Citizen Kane. The sound design is also Wellesian—the deportation, set to a terrifying martial bolero, becomes a danse macabre… However boldly stylized, Radok’s nightmare is grounded in reality.”
– J. Hoberman, Artforum

“As much a revelation for us as the films of Véra Chytilová, Milos Forman, or Jan Nemec.”
– Josef Škvorecký, A Personal History of the Czech Cinema