The Czech Film Center is part of the Czech Film Fund
23 April 2018
Diamonds of the Night at Cannes Classics
Diamonds of the Night at Cannes Classics
Diamonds of the Night (1964), the feature debut of celebrated Czech director Jan Němec, has been selected for the Cannes Classics section at the Cannes Film Festival. The festival audience will be the first to see the digitally restored version of the film. The restoration was carried out by the Universal Production Partners studio in Prague, under the supervision of the National Film Archive.
“The image was digitized from the original negative on Agfa and Kodak film stock in 4K. Missing parts were replaced from a duplicate positive. The source of the sound was the sound negative. The goal of digital restoration was to make the film available in a form similar to what audiences would have seen at the time it was first released, in 1964,” - said Tereza Frodlová from the National Film Archive. The film will be screened along with other world-renowned films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Seventh Seal, The Bicycle Thieves, Vertigo, War and Peace, Grease, The Big Blue, etc.
It is a second Czechoslovak film restored by NFA to be screened at Cannes Film Festival. In 2016, the sci-fi film Ikarie XB 1 by Jindřich Polák (1963), which inspired the director Stanley Kubrick to shoot the cult film 2001: Space Odyssey, was included in Cannes Classics.
The Czech premiere of the restored version of Diamonds of the Night is scheduled for August 2018.
More information on this year's Cannes Classics programme is available here.
