The story, a true one, tells of Eliska, an intelligent, relatively sophisticated medical student, working as a nurse at a Prague hospital, where her fiance is a surgeon. Both are members of a Resistance cell, for whom Eliska acts as a courier, carrying sensitive information. One day, she discovers that her fiance has fled and her life is in danger. The Nazis are onto them and she is persuaded to travel with one of her patients to his home in the Moravian mountains, where she must stay until the war is over. Ondrej Trojan's film depicts the culture shock of leaving a city, with its diversity and opportunity, for a rural peasant existence, which involves, for the sake of acceptance and security, a change of name, marital status and social aspirations. In other words, Eliska becomes Hanna, weds the man she had nursed and integrates with the community. Surprisingly, once Hanna sheds Eliska's persona and stops mourning her "new life," the story evolves into a romance. The villagers, from the priest to the schoolmaster to the midwife (who concocts her own potions) to the runaway boy (who lives in a hole in the ground), become infinitely sympathetic and interesting. And then aspects of war burst upon their peaceful idyll. 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; 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 fears 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 Godforsaken part of Europe surrounded by the storm of war.
