Alois Nebel (2011, Czech Republic, Germany & Slovakia, 84 minutes, ProRes 422)
Towards the close of the 1980s, Alois Nebel (Miroslav Krobot) is working as a dispatcher at the small railway station in Bílý Potok, a remote village in the Jeseník Mountains on the Czech-Polish border. He’s a loner who prefers old timetables to people and who finds the loneliness of the station tranquil – except when the fog rolls in. Then he hallucinates, seeing ghosts from a dark period in the region's immediate post-WWII history which saw the wholesale deportation of Sudeten Germans from the area.
Alois can’t shake these nightmares and winds up in a sanatorium. There he gets to know The Mute (Karel Roden), a man carrying an old photograph who was arrested by the police after crossing the border. No one knows why he came to Bílý Potok or who he’s looking for, but it is his past that propels Alois on his journey.
A singularly striking and atmospheric work, Alois Nebel is a deeply noir-ish graphic novel adaptation in which the technique of rotoscoping – think Richard Linklater's films Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly – is used brilliantly throughout. This approach, which took four years to realise, perfectly reproduces the look and feel of Jaroslav Rudiš and Jaromír 99's acclaimed source material.
Director Tomáš Luňák Producer Pavel Strnad Production Company Negativ Film Productions Distribution Madman Entertainment
This was a wonderful graphic film that stayed in your mind well after viewing.