Communist Prague: where kids fight gang wars and the regime steals your friends.
Tragicomic family film about the world of children heroes - particularly the son of a local communist officer and his friend, a little hostage of the regime, whose parents emigrated to the West, few years before "Prague Spring" and the occupation of Czechoslovakia. Camaraderie, the first big discoveries of love, enemy gang fights and naive ideas are confronted with the reality of adult's world. The film is about the first contacts with bizarre and absurd reality of relationships and attitudes of adults, politics, emigration, but also betrayal and death and about how all those things form and transform the lives of small boys, who are forced to grow up too quickly.
Acting
Child actors who actually feel like real kids.
Direction
Nvota balances slapstick and tragedy without whiplash.
Production
Period detail that smells like 1960s Czech fear.
Director
Juraj Nvota
Richard Labuda
Petr Achberger
Libuše Šafránková
Achbergerová
Milan Lasica
Achberger
Alexander Bárta
Achberger
Slávka Halčáková
Achbergerová
Ondřej Vetchý
Bašta
Miroslav Noga
Glanz
Robert Roth
Honza Kolář
Ondřej Malý
Reim
Milan Ondrík
Tomko
Petra Vajdová
Vaľová
Richard Autner
Preiss
Tamara Fischer
Helena Kraščičová
Szidi Tobias
Vernerová
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The 'hostage' refers to children left behind when parents defected—real Soviet Bloc policy used as leverage.
Director Nvota lived through this era; the school scenes mirror his own communist childhood.
CZ
