A key Czech film of the postwar period, The Distant Journey also was one of the first film treatments of the Holocaust. As critic J. Hoberman notes, it remains among the most original, "a stylized danse macabre...Audacious and grotesque, the movie looks back to Caligari and forward to the unsettling puppet animation of Jan Svankmajer." The film deals with the Jewish experience in the Terezín ghetto, where the director's father died. Expressionist formalism is used to nightmarish effect; newsreels are imposed beneath the story's images, and scenes of mass movement are formally staged with the camera moving rhythmically in, up, and back. The depiction of the dense infrastructure of the camps is extraordinary, and a scene showing starving newly arrived children inexplicably terrorized by Terezín's showers is both moving and horrifying. The Distant Journey was shot on location at Terezín. Hoberman writes, "Radok's Terezín scenes are charged with a sense of claustrophobic unreality and controlled hysteria...The image of old women scrubbing the narrow pavement where terrorized children sing and ballerinas dance like automatons...are worthy of Fritta, the graphic artist whose Terezín drawings were condemned by the Nazis as 'horror pornography.' Like Fritta's, Radok's most compelling scenes are based on actual events."