In the middle of a bleak winter wood stands a desolate farmhouse where a father and son are just managing to survive. No words pass between them as they go about their daily chores: the father ritually chopping wood to ensure a continuing fuel supply, the son picking through the dreary woods to various points where he has set leg-traps to catch their supper.

Throughout these silent routines, rounds of bullets are heard being fired in the distance while fighter jets occasionally scream overhead. The father and son are obviously carrying on as best they can in the middle of a war zone. The war will never be named nor will the combatant sides be identified, though the action is obviously placed somewhere in a corner of Eastern Europe that has turned deadly.

When the son returns to a clearing in the woods where he has set a trap for a deer, he finds instead an unconscious woman whose leg has been snared in the trap's jaws. She's dressed in the fatigues of a soldier and is carrying a small pouch filled with documents marked "secret." The son carries the woman back to the farmhouse to care for her out of a sense of guilt for having set the trap. His father angrily opposes having the woman in the house — not so much because it involves them in the fighting's intrigue, but he senses that she will upset the delicate, if grim, balance that exists between the two men. What follows is a domestic psychological drama played out before a backdrop of chaos and bloodshed.

Fresh from FAMU, first-time director Marta Nováková has been getting a lot of attention for her film Marta, and justly so. She's a director who knows how to create and maintain a tone and mood. The brooding, near-monochromatic atmosphere and blasted landscape she's conjured for the film is as haunting as the faces of her three principal actors.

There are many Tarkovskian overtones to Marta, which only means that as a young filmmaker Nováková is studying the great rather than the commercially successful (it does feel at times as if we've entered the "Zone" in Stalker). Her film is as encouraging a debut as Julius Sevcík's Restart was last year, and a much-needed antidote to the slough of teen sludge (invariably featuring the Cro-Magnon Jirí Mádl) that's been spilling out of Czech studios lately. There are a few missteps here and there, such as Nováková's use of distorted, hand-held video in filming the farmhouse from above, which gives the impression that Marta may suddenly devolve into another Blair Witch Project.

Nováková's three leads are excellent. Petra Spalková plays the injured female soldier as a tough fighter who allows herself private moments of soul-clenching terror. Jan Novotny´, as the father, is a grizzled, wounded man who has almost managed to extinguish any remnant of human feeling for his son. Vojtech Stepánek, as the son, seems to be following in his father's footsteps, as he, too, is emotionally dead until he finds the soldier in the woods.

Fans of Czech cinema may also detect the influence of another war film that throws a woman and two men together to survive the madness surrounding them as best they can: 1966's Kocár do Vídne (Coach to Vienna). However, it's no surprise that director Karel Kachyna's great film has some bearing on Marta, as Kachyna was Nováková's mentor at FAMU. One could almost look upon Marta as a companion piece to the earlier film.

As luck would have it, both films will be shown together at Svetozor next week (Sept. 7–