The Austria Centre Leiden Supports the Czechoslovak New Wave Film Festival in Rotterdam
On December 4, 2024, Prof. dr. Sarah Cramsey gave a short lecture before a film at the Czechoslovak New Wave Film Festival in Rotterdam. The festival was expertly organized by Ms. Hana Schenkova, the Director of the Czech Centre in Rotterdam, and featured more than a dozen films from Czechoslovakia in the 1960s.
Cramsey lectured before the film “Obchod na Korze” or “Shop on the High Street” which won an Academy Award for best international film in 1965. The film, directed by Jan Kadar and Elmer Klos, showcases how the Holocaust unfolded in a small Slovak town. At the center of the film is a relationship between an unlikely “couple”: an older Jewish widow (played by the famed Yiddish actress Ida Kaminska) who owns a small shop and the non-Jewish Slovak man who is ordered to confiscate the Jewish-owned business for himself. Cramsey situated the film in Czechoslovak film history and in the history which tracks visual representations of the Holocaust and the Second World War in Central Europe. The packed theater then enjoyed a viewing of the highly-acclaimed black and white film on the big screen.
