Beseder Gallery

Date: 13.1.2025 od 18:30

13.1. Monday, 18:30 - Defiant Requiem movie

A feature-length documentary that illuminates the most dramatic example of intellectual and artistic courage in the Terezín concentration camp during World War II: the remarkable story of Rafael Schächter, a brilliant young Czech conductor who was arrested and sent to Terezín in 1941.

His most extraordinary act was to recruit 150 prisoners and teach them Verdi's Requiem, using only score for piano over several rehearsals, at nights in a damp basement after grueling days of forced labor. The Requiem was performed at a concert organized in honor of the Red Cross. 

Among those, who still remember Schächter’s daring prophetic message is 93-year-old Edgar Krasa of Boston. “There was no applause by the Germans,” he recalls. “And from the Red Cross, there was no applause either.”

Schächter himself considered performing Verdi's Requiem as a work of defiance and resistance to the Nazis. The text of the Requiem Mass allowed them, as Schächter said, to "sing to the Nazis what we couldn't tell them"...

Decades after the end of the war, conductor Murray Sidlin revived a performance of this Requiem in the cellars of Terezín, this time with a larger professional choir and orchestra...

2012 - Defiant Requiem was selected by DocuWeeks as one of only twenty documentaries nationwide to be screened in theaters in New York and Los Angeles.
2013 - was broadcast in the US on PBS.
2014 - was broadcast on BBC4 in the UK. It was nominated for two Emmy Awards: for Outstanding Long Historical Documentary and Outstanding Screenplay.
2015 - was broadcast on France Télévisions.
2023 - was shown in the Czech Republic as part of the 6th Eternal Hope Music Festival.

The film "Defiant Requiem" will be presented in cooperation with the Endowment fund Music for Everlasting Hope, which has acquired the rights for its screening in the Czech Republic.

Admission: 200,- CZK

You can send payment by bank transfer to 2301891686/ 2010 or pay in cash at the event.