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MURDER IN POLNA

ZLOČIN V POLNÉ

By Viktor POLESNÝ

CZECH TELEVISION / ČESKÁ TELEVIZE - as SALES / DISTR

Drama - Completed 2016

The film describes the events which triggered off the largest wave of anti-Semitism ever recorded in the Czech Lands.On the Easter Saturday of 1899, nineteen-year-old seamstressAnežka Hruzová was found dead on the way between the villageof Vežnicka and the town of Polná.

- Year of production
- 2016
- Genres
- Drama, Jewish, Crime
- Countries
- CZECH REPUBLIC
- Languages
- CZECH
- Duration
- 245 mn
- Director(s)
- Viktor POLESNÝ
- Writer(s)
- Václav ŠAŠEK
- Cast
- Jaroslav PLESL, Karel HEŘMÁNEK JUN., Gabriela MÍČOVÁ, František NĚMEC, Luboš VESELÝ, Ondřej KAVAN, Miroslav ETZLER, Martin MYŠIČKA, Jiří PLACHÝ, Vilém UDATNÝ, Karel RODEN
- Synopsis
- The film describes the events which triggered off the largest wave
  of anti-Semitism ever recorded in the Czech Lands.
  On the Easter Saturday of 1899, nineteen-year-old seamstress
  Anežka Hrůzová was found dead on the way between the village
  of Věžnička and the town of Polná. Her throat had been slashed and
  she had obviously bled to death. To the local doctors it seemed that
  there's not enough coagulated blood on the scene of the crime, and
  the answer to the question where the “missing” blood had gone
  suggested itself: the Jews had used it in matzos. The potential killer
  happened to be available, too: a cheeky and not-to-clever youngster
  Leopold Hilsner, occasional day labourer, tramp and beggar.
  The Jew Hilsner was convicted and sentenced to death for the
  alleged ritual murder of Anežka Hrůzová. Later on, in a renewed
  trial in Písek, the verdict was confirmed, and the charges extended
  by sexual deviation: Hilsner was accused of another, still unsolved
  crime, a murder committed two years before. Zdeno Auředníček,
  Hilsner's young ex officio defence lawyer, was convinced of his
  client's innocence – but there were few others sharing his view.
  The best-know positive intervention in Hilsner's favour was that
  of T. G. Masaryk, who had the courage, his characteristic quality,
  to stand up against the medieval superstition about the principle
  of Jewish ritual killing. It was thanks to him, too, that Auředníček
  managed to get the sentence of death reduced to imprisonment for
  life. According to some testimonies, the real killer pleaded guilty on
  his death bed, and Hilsner was released after 18 years in jail.
  The effort for remedying the injustice perpetrated on Leopold
  Hilsner took nearly a hundred years – till the year of 1998.