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A FILM WORTH A CLOSER LOOKTHE FEATURE PRESENTATION
IF THIS ONE STAYED WITH YOU
Keep the feeling.
SIMILAR PICKS / A PERSONAL CONNECTION
01
Why this pick
Like Diamonds of the Night, this Slovak New Wave landmark confronts persecution through intimate, morally agonizing encounters, balancing stark realism with an increasingly nightmarish sense of helplessness.
02
Why this pick
A Nazi-occupied Prague becomes a shadowy psychological maze in this spare, expressionistic Holocaust drama, driven by dread, fractured perception, and the pressure of small survival choices.
03
Why this pick
Its stylized black-and-white imagery and unstable subjective viewpoint extend the Czech New Wave's nightmare logic, examining fascist corruption with grotesque, unsettling precision.
04
Why this pick
A former camp guard's present is pierced by incomplete memories of Auschwitz; its austere imagery and fragmented recollection make history feel immediate, unresolved, and morally inescapable.
05
Why this pick
Two exhausted partisans crossing a winter wasteland face capture and impossible ethical choices. Its severe physical ordeal and spiritual intensity echo Diamonds of the Night's stripped-down urgency.
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01 / THE STORY
''Diamonds of the Night'' begins with two young men fleeing from a train and shedding, as they run, long black coats, on which are painted in white the letters "KL," the abbreviation for ''Konzentrationslager'' (concentration camp). The film employs little dialogue, and the boys' escape through forests and swamps, and across rocky terrain, is interpolated with the dreams, memories, hallucinations, fantasies, and flashbacks of the younger of the two boys. In one sequence, the younger boy recalls exchanging his shoes with the older boy for a piece of food; in another, he seems to imagine returning to the apartment in Prague where he used to live; and in a third, he rides a Prague tram with shot-out windows while wearing once again the coat that identifies him as a concentration camp escapee. When the boys encounter a farmer's wife, the younger boy follows her into her kitchen to ask for food, and as he struggles with thoughts of murder and rape, the film repeatedly shows both possibilities. In the end the boy silently takes a few slices of bread from her and leaves. Eventually, the boys are caught by a shooting party of elderly German-speaking men, who detain the boys in a beer hall while they drink, eat, sing, and dance, before turning the boys over to the town's mayor. As the boys are marched out of the beer hall, the leader of the shooting party calls out, "Ready, aim, fire," but the men merely laugh instead of shooting. The ending is ambiguous: Either the boys have been spared, or they are walking into the afterlife.
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