A story that needed to be told

Rating: Null/10 (10 February 2009)

This film tells a story of the Second World War so remarkable that it is amazing that most people - me included - previously had no knowledge of it, even though it featured in a 400-plus page book by Holocaust scholar Nechama Tec published in 1993 - the main source material for the movie co-written, produced and directed by Edward Zwick and co-produced by Tec's son Roland. We are so used to Holocaust movies depicting the passivity of the Jews as quintessential victims - Roman Polanski's "The Pianist" on the Warsaw ghetto uprising was a notable exception - but this film narrates the astonishing tale of how a set of four brothers - Tuvia (Daniel Craig), "Zus" (Liev Schreiber), Asael (Jamie Bell) and Aron Bielski - led a group of partisan who fought the Germans and managed to rescue around 1,200 Jews from certain death.
The real location of the forest that was their home for more than two years was near Nowogródek (Navahrudak), an area that at the beginning of the Second World War belonged to Poland, but in September 1939 was seized by the Soviet Union and today is Belarus. The realistic location shooting for the film was actually in Lithuania, where 90% of the Jews were murdered, and there has been impressive attention to detail in the creation of the underground zemlyankas (dugouts) and the clothing and weaponry of the Bielski otriad (partisan detachment). Also the tough decisions which the leaders of the group had to take and some of the brutal actions that the partisans carried out are not missed out. So, in spite of being a little stilted at times, this is both an honourable ans effective piece of film-making that tells a little-known story in a manner which manages to be both informative and entertaining.