Just a couple of small points on "Zelary," an impressive Czech film on which it would be appropriate to devote books:

First, the ubiquity of slivovitza (traditional, often home-brewed Slovak plum brandy). Everyone--men, women, old people, had a bottle of slivovitza and used it at appropriate times (which seemed to be every moment--times of celebration, times of stress, times of sickness [often poured on the wound or taken through the mouth], etc.).

Second, the film shed light on the question of women and work, in the sense that it wasn't a question in the film: women worked along side men--everyone in the community laboured together. The main character had been in medical school and a member of the resistance to Nazism; an old woman played the role of community mid-wife and holistic doctor; a young woman with no husband raised her daughter on her own. Basically, families worked together to do what they needed to do to survive--no job was more or less glamorous. All were somewhat tedious. It seems like the women and work issue is one faced primarily by elite women and less often by people in villages in rural areas.

Finally, on the wedding night of a marriage of convenience, the man says to his new wife: "I have been unfaithful to you." He is referring not to something recent, but to something in his past. This includes a profound conception of marriage that doesn't hold it just to the present, but rather acknowledges that it extends to the past and to the future (just as a thick conception of community includes those not yet born and those who have died).