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HOWLING WITH ANGELS

By Jean Bodon

CIRCA FILM - as SALES All rights, World

Drama - Completed 2006

Contact: Tom Garrett- Producer and Int'l Sales

- Year of production
- 2006
- Genres
- Drama, Historical
- Countries
- FRANCE
- Budget
- 1 - 3 M$
- Duration
- 60 mn
- Director(s)
- Jean Bodon
- Writer(s)
- Jean Bodon
- Producer(s)
- Tom Garrett , Jean Bodon
- Synopsis
- On March 15, 1939, Hitler’s army marched into Prague, Czechoslovakia. Jan Bodon, a young captain in the Czechoslovakian Army—fluent in German, blond-haired, and blue-eyed—was “asked” to join the Nazis. He agreed. The next day he disappeared.
  Bodon met clandestinely with the resolutely anti-German ex-president Edvard Benes (pronounced Benesh) and other deserters. Benes instructed the soldiers to escape as best they could and meet up in France. About 3,000 Czechs escaped, including Bodon, and became fighters in the Czech Resistance Movement.
  “It’s a little-known fact that Czechoslovakia, through its government-in-exile, was one of the Allies,” says filmmaker Jean Bodon, son of Captain Jan Bodon. “It’s also not well-known that the extermination of the Jewish people in Czechoslovakia was probably one of the largest in any country besides Poland and Hungary.” In the city of Kocise, where Bodon’s father was raised, there were 15,000 Jews—some 25 percent of the population. Only 400 survived the Nazi occupation.
  Bodon captures the Czechoslovakian experience in World War II in his documentary, titled Howling with the Angels—after a quotation from an anti-Nazi speech by Benes. In researching this film he is learning more about his father’s experiences during that extraordinary time—and much, much more about his own heritage.
  “My father told me that he walked and took the train to escape Czechoslovakia. As it turns out, the way he ‘took’ the train was by hiding underneath it, near the wheel, where the latrines emptied out. My father never told me that part of the story, but I’m finding out the details.”