Unlikely Romance and Resistance in WWII

Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Zelary is a gorgeously photographed, classically intimate rural drama about one woman’s unlikely romance and resiliency during World War II.

Set in the 1940s in the Czech lands occupied by the Nazis, Zelary tells the story of a clash between two different worlds and two different people. It is the story of an extraordinary love between a scholarly nurse active in the Resistance and a man from the wild mountain village of Zelary, where nothing has changed in 150 years.

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More About Zelary

It is the 1940s and the Czech lands have been occupied by the Nazis. Eliska is a young woman who was unable to complete medical school because the Germans closed the universities and now works as a nurse in a city hospital. She is also involved in the resistance movement along with her lover, the surgeon Richard, and their friend Dr. Chldek.

One night, a man from a rural mountain area is brought to the hospital with serious injuries and desperately needs a transfusion. Eliska is the only one with the same blood type. Her blood saves his life and a connection is formed between the two that in the course of the story becomes an extraordinarily strong relationship between the modern, cosmopolitan, and educated Eliska and the barbaric, salt of the earth man with the soul of a child, Joza.

The resistance group that the doctors are involved in is discovered and hunted by the Gestapo and suddenly their lives are threatened. While Eliska's lover, Richard, flees the country overnight, the group quickly has to find a different safe haven for her. They ask Joza, the patient whose life she saved with her blood, to hide her in his remote mountain cabin.

Eliska is forced to leave her urban life and all at once become a new woman: Hana, the wife of a mountain man. Her new home is the wild mountain village where time stopped one hundred and fifty years ago called Zelary.

Zelary tells the story of a clash between two different worlds and two different people. It is the story of an extraordinary relationship, of fear, misgivings, suspicion and especially of the love that forms out of antagonism between Eliska/Hana and Joza; a love born of the common will to survive.

Zelary is also the story of a beautiful corner of the Earth where everything lives in accordance with nature and her often cruel and timeless laws that humans must adapt to and honor. Eliska, in spite of setbacks, but with great fervor, tries to learn this. Last but not least, Zelary is also a dramatic story filled with unexpected twists of fate that takes place in a God-forsaken part of Europe surrounded by the storm of war.