A 12-year-old boy walks home to Yugoslavia. On foot. In winter. No cap.
The twelve year old Ivo has been living in Vienna with his family for three years. His father and brothers work at construction sites. Their Austrian neighbors despise the Yugoslav guest workers. Because the mother has to look after the sick grandmother at home in Croatia, Ivo runs the male household in Vienna alone. Solitude and insults from the locals make the child unhappy. And so Ivo decides on a rainy winter's day to return to his home village on his own.
Direction
Jasný's poetic eye finds beauty in industrial grime.
Acting
Young lead carries unbearable loneliness without a single tantrum.
Director
Vojtěch Jasný
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Shot during the peak of Yugoslav Gastarbeiter migration to Austria, when over 200,000 workers faced exactly this hostility. Jasny, himself a Czech exile, knew this displacement intimately.
The child actor was reportedly an actual Yugoslav immigrant discovered at a Vienna construction site — method casting decades before the term existed.
DE
AT
