Zelary

Anna Geislerova, Gyorgy Cserhalmi, Trude Ackermann , Jaroslava Adamova, Miroslav Donutil.

Ondrej Trojan.

Czech, drama.

Nominated for Best Foreign film at the 2004 Academy Awards.

It is the 1940s and the Czech lands have been occupied by the Nazis. Eliška 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. Chládek. One night, a man from a rural mountain area is brought to the hospital with serious injuries and desperately needs a transfusion. Eliška 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 Eliška 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 Eliška’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. Eliška 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.