A Tale of Two Villages – a bridge between Lidice and Wales
In a Prague second-hand bookshop, I came across a book produced by the Czechoslovak Interior Ministry in 1945, in the months just after the war. It recorded details of the massacre of June 1942 in Lidice. A total of 340 people from the village were murdered. There was a reference in the book to a film that had been made in Britain by Humphrey Jennings immediately after the massacre. I decided to find out more.
In the film The Silent Village, the mining village of Cwmgiedd in the Swansea Valley “becomes” Lidice. There are no actors. It is like a passion play, in which the villagers take on the role of those who were killed a thousand miles to the east. The film was made just months after the massacre.
In the summer of 1999, I travelled to Lidice and Cwmgiedd and found a bond far deeper than I had expected.
The result was a radio documentary, A Tale of Two Villages. I spoke to people in both villages and discovered that the memory of Lidice is very much alive in Cwmgiedd, mixed with memories of a wartime summer of filming.
Here is that documentary, which was broadcast by Radio Prague in 2000.
A Tale of Two Villages was awarded the Prix Bohemia in 2001.
The Second Life of Lidice and Place
After making A Tale of Two Villages, I approached the Czech film maker Pavel Štingl and together we made the television documentary Druhý život Lidic (The Second Life of Lidice) for Czech TV.
Later I also wrote a A Foreign Country, published in the book Place (Thames and Hudson, 2005). The text was inspired by my experiences of making these two documentaries.
For more, see the section Projects and Exhibitions.