Format: Feature screenplay
Theme: Courage is not absence of fear.
Logline: Set in the world of international espionage, a young athlete trains to be a spy to defeat his biggest fan – the murderous head of the occupation – while he rebuilds the resistance that leads to a national uprising.
Jan Cerny, born into privilege, faces the cruel challenges of war and occupation. Much admired for his looks and athletic skills by Hitler’s sadistic surrogate, Reinhard Heydrich, Jan becomes a key figure in the plot to kill Heydrich.
The Fortress is in the genre of espionage adventures but goes beyond the conventional war film. Jan, the young Czech hero, from an ancient town the Nazis will convert into a Gestapo prison and concentration camp, is forced to abandon his comfortable life to fight an enemy of immeasurable evil. This requires all his cunning, resourcefulness, and determination as his world is torn apart, and those he most loves, his family and friends, are destroyed.
Jan embodies the best qualities of youth – the willingness to take on a battle larger than himself– yet there are his very human fears: his fear of flying, fear of losing his younger brother, fear of never again seeing the Scottish girl, Anna, whom he has met in an espionage training camp in Scotland and with whom he has fallen in love, and the fear of being discovered as a saboteur by the arch-Nazi Heydrich, whose predatory instincts are always on guard against those who might be enemies of the Reich.
Heydrich sees in Jan the perfect Aryan – the ideal the Nazis worship. Jan is the consummate soldier; handsome, strong, youthful, athletic, intelligent, with aristocratic bloodlines, which, for Heydrich, makes him the embodiment of the master race. The great irony is that Jan – the Nazi ideal – is to be the instrument of Heydrich’s destruction.
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THE FORTRESS is inspired by true events. Some characters have been composited.
All events happened as written.
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