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In July 1992, fleeing the war in former Yugoslavia, some patients of the Bosnian mental institution in Jakes leave for Hungary. Since 1996, these patients are housed on a ward of a refugee centre in the Hungarian city of Debrecen, where the rooms are clean but bare. The filmmakers talk to patients, who would rather go back home. They interview the psychiatrist in attendance, who wonders why there is no place in Bosnia for this small group. In Bosnia, they interview the psychiatrist of their former institution; old video footage shows the ravages of war. Plaintive singing on the soundtrack accompanies a trip across snow-clad Bosnia, where the filmmakers visit the patients' relatives. Their reactions are similar each time: they did not know that the patients were in Hungary now, but Bosnia has a lack of money, doctors and medicine. According to their relatives - and the director of a new institution in Jakes - they are better off in Hungary.
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Original Language
EN
When Allied forces liberated the Nazi concentration camps in 1944-45, their terrible discoveries were recorded by army and newsreel cameramen, revealing for the first time the full horror of what had happened. Making use of British, Soviet and American footage, the Ministry of Information’s Sidney Bernstein (later founder of Granada Television) aimed to create a documentary that would provide lasting, undeniable evidence of the Nazis’ unspeakable crimes. He commissioned a wealth of British talent, including editor Stewart McAllister, writer and future cabinet minister Richard Crossman – and, as treatment advisor, his friend Alfred Hitchcock. Yet, despite initial support from the British and US Governments, the film was shelved, and only now, 70 years on, has it been restored and completed by Imperial War Museums under its original title "German Concentration Camps Factual Survey".
