This is the best treatment of the Holocaust that I have ever seen. An amazingly believable story about neighbors torn by the shroud of invasion. Set in Czechoslovakia during W.W.II, this is a glorious movie with passion, drama, action, suspense, betrayal, kindness, humor, man's inhumanity to man, survival, and the undeniable truth that you are only what you make of yourself. You surround yourself with people that you trust and hope for the best. The acting was superb! The directing excellent. I didn't want to get out of my seat at the conclusion. Be prepared to laugh and to cry and to leave the theater thoroughly refreshed, which is a rarity lately.

As the son of a Holocaust survivor, I am never sure how I will handle films depicting the events which claimed the lives of so many of my family. "Musíme si pomáhat" had its Perth première at the Festival Film season held at a wonderful open-air auditorium at the University, a place which has for me always represented a celebration of life, and each visit on a balmy summer night is an expression of my great joy to have this beautiful sunny city as my home. My father, now nearly 84, loves coming here, expresses his joy at being alive, having come through unspeakable horrors, and sees each year he stays fit and healthy as a gesture of defiance to those who were so eager to snuff out his existence more than six decades ago.

In watching Josef wheel the pram in that final sequence past the ruins of his war-devastated home town, I could see his great joy to be alive, to have come through the horror which ultimately had one of his own countryman put a pistol to his head and tense his finger on the trigger. All the sacrifices he made, having to put at incredible risk the lives of himself and his wife, withstand the grossness of the Nazi toady Horst (Würst),submit to associating with the loathsome German occupying forces, and ultimately insist on his wife having sex with David, have yielded their great reward. He has his son, biologically David's son, but in all reality his. He has his marriage, and they all have a future which they will now carve out of the ruins. It is an incredibly hopeful ending.

Reading some of the other comments on imdb, I feel a few missed the point, especially the Californian guy who thought it was German language film (it's Czech, mate!) and those who were troubled by the camera shakes. I could clearly feel that these were expressions of Josef's moments of utter panic, when time for him seemed to distort into flicker-frame slow-motion and he was clearly struggling hard just to retain control of speech and movement. At one point he says that he had shat himself. I think I'd have done the same, and my mental camera would certainly have shaken.

Ten out of ten. If you haven't yet seen it, do!

In Krszysztof Kieslowski's brilliant film, 'No End', set in post-Solidarity Poland, a lawyer tells a dissident union leader: 'You decided to collaborate the day you decided not to throw yourself under a tank.' Which is of course true, but often forgotten in our easy condemnation of those who picked the wrong side in past wars. To have been a baker in occupied France, say, and to have continued with your work, draws no retrospective judgement; to have been a senior civil servant is to earn today the label of a Nazi. Of course, Nazism was almost uniquely repugnant, and yet could have been stopped had no-one collaborated; but those of us lucky enough not to have lived through the war need also be careful about setting up standards that we ourselves could not have met. 'Divided We Fall' is a Czech drama set in World War Two, whose strength is it's honesty is portraying both the courage of ordinary people, and also the limits of that courage. It's heroes become reluctant enemies of the Germans when they shelter a Jewish fugitive for initially just one night; and are then forced to follow through on their actions. Director Jan Hrebejk is rather too keen on the peculiar trick of shooting film with a reduced refresh rate, rather like an old silent movie, so that his characters' movements appear odd and jerky: I'm not too sure what this is supposed to achieve. The gloomy nature of the central protagonist also leads to a lack of tonal variation in the piece, he is terminally depressed even before he gets into trouble, and this pervasive mood of hopelessness takes some of the zing out of what at times feels a slow-paced movie. But the merit of this work is it's portrayal of real human beings, doing both good and bad things, for mixed motives, at times of intense pressure. 'Divided We Fall' might not be a great film; but it is a true one.