Premiered in Karlovy Vary last week, In Silence is as beautiful as any movie about real-life historical genocide can be.

A Czech-Slovak co-production partly financed by Czech television, writer-director Zdenek Jirasky’s sophomore feature is saturated in music and ravishing pastel-tinted cinematography, which transforms even the most harrowing scenes into painterly tableaux.

Putting a fresh slant on well-worn cinematic themes, In Silence is a stylized docu-drama drawing on the lives of real Jewish musicians in Czechoslovakia and Germany who were persecuted during the Holocaust.