director: Caroline van Dommelen
year: 1911
country: Netherlands
alternative titles: De verbanning naar Siberië

The story concerned a group of Nihilists, members of an extreme revolutionary party in 19th-century Russia, finding nothing to approve of in the constitutional order of things, and was intended to expose the evils of Czarist Russia, where prisoners were ill-treated and arbitrarily deported to Siberia. In the final scene, the dying heroine, herself one of the exiles, is dragged from the mine-shaft in which she has been forced to work and thrown into the snow, where she breathes her last.

Foreign release title: Les Exiles
Translated title: The Exiles / The banishment to Siberia
Production company: Filmfabriek F.A. Nöggerath
Premiere: Dec. 09, 1911
Distribution: FAN Film (Amsterdam)
Second director: Leon Boedels
Producer: F.A. Nöggerath jr
Cast: Caroline van Dommelen (Alexandra Iwanovna Medjanof), Cato Mertens - de Jaeger (Warwara Bogodouchow), Louis van Dommelen (Boris Netchaeieff, a student), Jef Mertens (kolonel Rimski Korsakoff G. Retniensky)
Screenplay by Caroline van Dommelen, based on the play "Vera, or the nihilists" (1880) by Oscar Wilde
Length: 1000 meters, 2 reels
Format: 35mm
Picture/Sound: Silent, b/w
Release abroad: Belgium: April 1912 as Les Exiles (length given as 759 meters)

Sources:
Geoffrey Donaldson, Of Joy and Sorrow. A Filmography of Dutch Silent Fiction, Amsterdam 1997, p. 79

Submitted by Suzan Crommelin , EYE Film Institute Netherlands
email: SuzanCrommelin@eyefilm.nl

Source notes
Suzan Crommelin, EYE Film Institute Netherlands, 02.12.2009

This film has partly been shot at Muiden Castle (Muiderslot).
Background information on a missing collection of eighteen films by the Dutch production company Filmfabriek F.A. Nöggerath: Franz Anton Nöggerath started as early as 1896 as a film exhibitor and from 1898 also produced films in all genres. Besides, Filmfabriek F.A. Nöggerath represented the British Urban-Warwick Trading Company in the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark. In 1908 F.A. Nöggerath jr. took over this film company from his father and produced between 1911 to 1913 eighteen fiction films in his own film studio near Amsterdam. Most of these films were popular comedies, but he also made some serious dramas. However, the films were not successful and in 1914 the firm was declared bankrupt. The films have never been found in the Netherlands, but, since the contacts with Warwick it is possible they ended up abroad.