Prague, Nov 3 (CTK) – Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer will play the main role in the Czech film about Milada Horakova, a Czechoslovak democratic MP executed by the communists in 1950, who has become a symbol of courageous struggle for freedom, the project’s spokeswoman Simona Andelova told CTK on Thursday.
Born in Tel Aviv, Zurer has achieved success in Hollywood. Her very first English-spoken role in Steven Spielberg’s film Munich has been widely appreciated.
In Milada, the new film by Martin Mrnka, U.S. actor Robert Gant will play Horakova’s husband, Bohuslav. Czech actors will appear in other roles, including the popular Ana Geislerova as Ludmila Brozova, an infamous young communist prosecutor in the fabricated trial of Horakova.
The film will be shot in English and subsequently dubbed in Czech. The picture will be coloured in a way to make it compatible with the period documents, also used in the film, and to evoke the atmosphere of the 1950s, Andelova said.
The shooting will take place mainly in Prague, Terezin, where the Nazis established a ghetto and an internment camp during WWII, the Sumava mountains and in the surroundings of Hradec Kralove, the native region of Horakova’s husband.
“The film makers want to present the dramatic fate of Milada Horakova, which shattered the world at the time…It is a life story of the main character. It shows Milada’s ambitions and doubts, her dilemma on whether to fulfil its duty towards her homeland or her family, and her determination to live in harmony with her conscience,” Andelova said.
Horakova’s daughter Jana Kanska has provided so far unpublished materials including private letters, family photos and Bohuslav Horak’s memories, to the film makers.
Milada, nevertheless, is not a documentary but a feature film though it contains exact quotations from Horakova’s last letters, her speech before the court, President Klement Gottwald’s speech during the Communist coup in 1948 and others, said Mrnka, who studied film direction and production in Australia and worked as producer for the CNN – International in 2013-2014.
