People had heard of the ill-fated Warsaw Ghetto uprising and of non-Jewish rescuers such as Oskar Schindler, but there was scant evidence of other Jewish resistance.

The film follows three Jewish brothers who escape from Nazi-occupied Poland into the Belarussian forest, where they join Russian resistance fighters and build a village in order to protect themselves and others in danger.

James Bond star Daniel Craig leads the cast as Tuvia Bielski supported by Jamie Bell, Liev Schreiber and George MacKay as his brothers Asael, Zus and Aron.

"I grew up in the Jewish tradition, read a lot about the Holocaust, and my father was an American soldier in Second World War so I thought I'd heard a lot of the most interesting stories from that time," Frohman said. "But I'd never heard about the Bielski brothers."

While attending an American football match, Frohman gave Nechama Tec's book to his friend, award-winning film director Edward Zwick.

Frohman explained: "As a filmmaker, Ed has that ability to combine the intimate and the epic, to mix the deepest character work with the intensity of life-and-death stakes.

"This was a chance for us to make the kind of epic action-drama that rarely gets made any more."

LOVE: Alexa Davalos, centre, as Tuvia's wife, Lilka

One of the biggest challenges of bringing the story to life was finding a way to compress three years of harrowing struggle, sibling rivalry, and physical hardships into a two-hour film.

Even paying heed to true events, Zwick notes that he was never interested in presenting a documentary.

He said: "I've always seen it as a story about passionate people who manage to hold on to their humanity in the most dire circumstances.

"I want audiences to be on the edge of their seats, a feeling that only a movie can create. The excitement was all there in the real story."

But he did not want to whitewash the violence committed by the partisans in the name of survival.

Zwick, who also directed Blood Diamond, said: "The Bielskis weren't saints. They were flawed heroes, which is what makes them so real and so fascinating.

"As their community grew they were forced to become real leaders, to take on huge responsibility and discover their finest selves."

He added: "Daniel and Liev developed a lovely, bantering, playfully competitive relationship off-screen that brought unexpected humour and feeling to their scenes together.

"Daniel and Jamie became close as well, with Daniel taking on an almost mentoring, older brother role, both on and off-camera."

The film really took shape once Craig agreed to play the role of leader Tuvia.

Zwick said: "Daniel is at heart a very modest man, yet also quite forceful. He's also physically imposing, and the one thing everyone who knew him said about Tuvia is that he was strong and charismatic."

Schreiber, a Tony Award-winning theatre actor and a versatile screen star, approached the character by exploring the stark contrasts between Zus and Tuvia.

"Zus is someone who is always driven to fight," he said.

"He starts out believing that the most important thing is to make someone pay for the loss of his family and for all that he has endured."

In the forest, the Bielskis begin an unpredictable, perilous life that nevertheless turns into something richer than they could ever have expected.

As the village grows, taking in not just fighters but schoolteachers, doctors, children and the elderly, they find themselves running a diverse village, one that despite being in constant danger is also teeming with life.

Like many others in the forest, each of the Bielskis meet a woman who will have a profound effect on his life.

For Zwick, the casting of these "forest wives" was as essential as the casting of the brothers. To play Tuvia's wife, Lilka, he chose Alexa Davalos, a young French actress.

Zwick continued: "Theirs is not a conventional love story because they believe the tasks they are doing are far more important than any feelings they might have for each other.

"Yet Daniel and Alexa's scenes together are beautiful in the way he resists her, then is finally overcome by the need for connection."

Davalos was immediately attracted to Lilka's profound inner strength.

"I think it's her ability to stand up for what's right that draws Tuvia to her," she said. "Lilka fights for what she believes in, a rare quality for a woman in those times, and something they have in common."

Other characters include Shimon Haretz and Isaac Malbin, intellectuals locked in an existential disputation about the spiritual life versus the secular.

Shimon, once Tuvia's schoolteacher, embodies another of the film's themes - the quest to understand God's place in a world of such suffering and destruction.

For actor Allan Corduner, the part was especially resonant because his grandfather died in Auschwitz.

He said: "There were many acts of defiance, so it was important to me this story be told.

"I also enjoyed how the script managed to be powerful without being sentimental. Much is left unsaid, which allows it to become personal for the audience."

Mark Feuerstein, who has also appeared in The West Wing, said: "Shimon and Isaac are like Estragon and Vladimir in Waiting For Godot.

"They represent a central dialectic in Jewish intellectual life: brilliant minds trying to come to terms with the overwhelming horror of what was happening.

"And they have a relationship like any Jewish family relationship, where yelling and squabbling and arguing is a form of love."

Zwick's first problem was where to shoot the film.

Since Belarus is now a dictatorship, filming there was out of the question.

Instead, a search of the surrounding eastern European countries led Zwick and his team to Vilnius, Lithuania, which offered both an authentic landscape and a small but eager filmmaking community.

The city also contained many heart-rending reminders of what the Jews of Vilnius experienced when the Nazis entered the city in June, 1941, killing 21,000 and herding the remainder into two prison-like ghettos in the Jewish quarter.

Of a community once estimated at 60,000, there remain today only a small number of Jews, but the survivors were excited by the film.

Many who had been in the forest as refugees visited the set and marvelled at its authenticity and some even worked as extras.

Throughout the production, Zwick maintained a close relationship with the extended Bielski family, especially the first-generation children of Tuvia and Zus, for whom the film became a chance to preserve their parents' legacy for future generations.

For the Bielski family, it had been a life-long struggle to have their parents' story told. Mickey Bielski, Tuvia's oldest son, remembered that it was other people who first mentioned the incredible secrets in his father's past.

He said: "I actually heard other survivors talking about it before he did. Out of the blue, someone would say something dramatic, such as 'Your father saved my life'.

"I had no idea what they were talking about, but it certainly piqued my interest."

Like many Holocaust survivors, Tuvia found it difficult to talk about the past and focused instead on creating a better future for his children in America.

Zvi Bielski, one of Zus' sons, notes that his father was a bit more forthcoming than his more taciturn elder.

"He always emphasised how they took their revenge on the Nazis. He was proud of that - but he was most proud of all the people they saved," he recalled.

Robert Bielski said that when Zwick first met with the family in New York it seemed to bring all their hopes full circle.

He explained: "Ed offered us his vision of what the film was going be - and we felt he had it right on target: the sense of what the story was really about, the sense of who the brothers really were.

"What he also understood was the enormity of having so many survive, this monumental notion of 1,200 people walking out of the woods who would go on to create five more generations."

www.defiancemovie.co.uk