Tomás Bata, one of the fathers of modern Czech industry, founded a vast shoemaking empire that now stretches around the world to 68 countries on six continents. Yet he considered footwear secondary to the well-being of his workers, historians say. And that made him a revolutionary entrepreneur.

A new film by two British directors — part documentary, part road movie — attempts to capture this legacy by following former workers from two now-defunct Bata factories in Britain as they journey by bus across Europe to the east Moravian city of Zlín, where Bata founded his empire in 1894.

Bata-ville: We Are Not Afraid of the Future premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in August to much acclaim. The film's directors, Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie, say they're in talks with the European Cultural Foundation about releasing a Czech subtitled version and hope to distribute the film in the Czech Republic.

Historians of Bata await.

"I think [Bata's] legacy is very important, especially for entrepreneurs today," says Pavel Velev, executive director of the Tomás Bata Foundation. "They can look at his ideas and see that although they were very simple, they also worked perfectly."

Bata mixed the utopian ideals of Thomas More with the business acumen of Henry Ford. He introduced a system of conveyer belts — the first used in Czech industry — modeled after Ford's assembly line and the result revolutionized the footwear industry.

The original Bata headquarters in Zlín (the company relocated its headquarters to Canada in 1962) was a model for other Bata factories: a town unto itself, with a complex of employee housing, a swimming pool, cinema, tennis courts, football fields and a hotel for visitors.

"[Tomás Bata] was very unusual for his time in that he wanted to do something with people to make their lives better," says Velev. "He did this in Zlín first, and then he repeated it all over the world."

Pope became inspired to do Bata-ville after working on a separate project in East Tilbury, a small Thames River community in England that was home to a Bata shoe plant for most of the 20th century. "East Tilbury was very much a mini-model of Zlín," says Pope.

Joan James, 73, who worked in the East Tilbury plant's export department from 1947 to 1972, is one of the former Bata employees who makes the trip in the film. Her parents were also Bata employees, and she lived on the company estate from age 8. "The Bata company was able to send people all over the world and make them feel at home," she says. "It definitely created a sense of community."

As she set off for Zlín, James says, she was hardly prepared for the extent to which Zlín mirrored her hometown. "It was definitely amazing to see the similarities. The houses are the same and the layout is so identical, but on a bigger scale. The hotel in Zlín was exactly like the one in East Tilbury. It was uncanny."

Serious issues underpin the journey: The global economy shut down both of Bata's UK factories in recent years. In visiting Zlín, the British workers recall what they've lost at home. Nevertheless, Pope says, most of them found the trip uplifting and felt no resentment toward Bata.