The Silent Village

Humphrey Jennings, Peter Finnemore, Rachel Trezise, Paolo Ventura

On June 10th 1942, the Nazis obliterated the Czechoslovakian village of Lidice. Within weeks of the tragedy, work had begun on translating those events into a film supported by the Ministry of Information, London, and made in South Wales. The result, The Silent Village by Humphrey Jennings in 1943 both memorialises a recent tragedy, and alludes to future scenarios involving loss of liberty and ultimately death.

The film has provided contemporary artists and writers with an opportunity to reflect on the circumstances that brought it into being and some of the issues it raises. The artists Paolo Ventura and Peter Finnemore, the writer Rachel Trezise and the film historian David Berry, offer their response to a film that is both a reconstruction of the Lidice atrocity and a film about Welsh life in the early 1940s.

A Ffotogallery touring exhibition curated by Russell Roberts, Reader in Photography at the European Centre for Photographic Research, University of Wales, Newport.