Weekly Parsha

Hollywood actress Jessica Chastain and the female director of her new movie are celebrating both the strength and the tenderness of women. Chastain, director Niki Caro and other actors were in Warsaw Tuesday for a gala screening of the movie "The Zookeeper's Wife."

It tells the real-life story of the World War II director of the Warsaw zoo, Jan Zabinski, and of his wife Antonina, who jointly saved up to 300 Jews, hiding them in their home on the zoo grounds and in animal enclosures, risking their own lives and those of their two children.

Shot in Prague, Czech Republic, the movie opens in theaters March 31. Two-time Academy Award nominee Chastain, who plays Antonina Zabinska, told a news conference she felt "so inspired" by the story of human kindness "that we need so much today.

" She said it was exciting to play how Antonina, initially unsure of herself, "is left alone at the house and given all this responsibility for caring for all these people, and to protect them she grows into herself," until by the end of the movie she is an equal with her husband.