Summary
Nightfall drapes a Moravian hamlet in sulphurous dread; torches jitter like malignant fireflies while drunken hymns curdle into the clamor of a pogrom. Through splintered tavern doors the innkeeper—hunched over ledgers of hospitality—meets a cudgel’s wet thud; his blood soaks the sawdust, a crimson ledger no one will balance. His daughter Rivka, auburn hair whipping like a comet’s tail, flees across frostbitten cobbles but iron hands wrestle her onto a makeshift cross. Splinters gnaw her palms, snowflakes fuse with tears, and the mob—half-ashamed, half-drunk on righteousness—nails not flesh but reputation: she is crucified in effigy yet alive, marched to a hilltop convent whose bell tolls a guttural absolution. Inside the stone maw of the cloister a child quickens, fruit of a clandestine liaison, its heartbeat echoing the tympani of shame. Years unspool in chiaroscuro: the boy, now called Tomáš, grows beneath the tutelage of a guardian whose cassock smells of mildew and secrets; his lessons are Latin verbs and the creak of a confessional hinge. He pores over parchment like a monk illuminating damnation, unaware that each stroke of ink rewrites the scar tissue of his mother—still indentured to a god who never answered her screams. When the student finally unearths the scaffold of his origin, the village’s complicity, and the convent’s complicity, the film tilts into a fevered reckoning: candlewax drips onto transcriptions of hate, a choir of spectral children hums Kaddish beneath Gothic arches, and the camera—obsessive, predatory—lingers on a wooden crucifix warped by winter rain, its grain splitting like generational guilt.
Synopsis
During a pogrom against Jews in a village, an innkeeper is killed, his daughter is put in a convent after being crucified, and her illegitimate child, who later grows up to be a student, is placed in the care of a guardian.
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