A war-time drama unfolds

Zelary, a Czech movie set in Czechoslovakia during World War II will be aired as Movie of the month on UTV World Movies on Sunday, September 27 at 8.30 pm.

One of the five nominees of the Best Foreign Language Film category at Oscar 2004, and nominated for 11 Czech Lions in its homeland, Zelary is well worth its two and a half hours of screen time. It's a convincing romantic drama, written, directed and acted with so much skill that it's able to break loose from its conventional moorings and become more effective, more moving than we anticipated.

Directed by Ondrej Trojan, who produced the marvellous Divided We Fall, and written by Petr Jarchovsky, Zelary follows the emotional journey of a woman who gets ripped out of her relatively comfortable life and thrust into a completely different place by the exigencies of World War II. Except in this case, the alien environment is not on another continent but instead close to home.