UN Film

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.

This simple story is the feature debut for well-known Slovak theater and television director Juraj Nvota. Set in a Slovak village at the turn of the last century, the story teems with passion, and repressed and hidden emotion. It delves into the search for identity, investigating both love and hatred, while dramatizing the tragic relationship between an adolescent girl (Tatiana Pauhofová) and her ambitious father (Ondrej Vetchý). Set against the striking though simple backdrop of a picturesque, even idyllic, landscape - one ostensibly cut off from any important historical, political, or social context whatsoever - the arrival of an unwanted individual evokes the onset of a cruel drama.