Did you devour adventure books as a child and hope that one day you would find your way to treasure? So did we. And we managed it — not in the Amazon, but at home in the Krkonoše mountains. Prospectors searching for precious stones came here in the Middle Ages, and we followed their trail with a camera.
In 2020 a group of researchers from Trutnov found a small book in a Berlin archive recording a journey to treasure in the Krkonoše. The parchment volume of thirteen densely written pages, full of deposits, was written by Antonio Vale of Florence in 1430. He is said to have left signs behind him in the landscape. Can his notes still be followed today?
Our documentary is a cross between a scientific detective story and an Indiana Jones adventure, filmed on both the Czech and Polish sides of the mountains. Our guide is the researcher Otto Štemberka, who has spent fifteen years on the subject. His driving force is to decipher six-hundred-year-old notes and test them in the field.
What did the Walloons believe in? What were they afraid of? What kept them going? Could they really grow rich in the Czech mountains? And can precious stones still be found in the Krkonoše today? Above all: why travel to the other side of the planet when real adventure waits behind the house?
After sixteen shooting days and hundreds of hours in post-production we ran a crowdfunding campaign to finish the film. It was backed by 107 supporters.
The film can be rented on the Czech VOD platform IndieStream.