Barefoot

During the Second World War an eight-year-old boy has to leave Prague with his family and settle in a small town called Slavonice. For a boy raised in the city everything there is foreign: the relatives, the work in the fields, the stubble you walk on barefoot, the rules of the town. He makes new friends, has his first fights, sees death for the first time. The war is not far away, but the child reads it off the faces of the adults. Jan Svěrák directed; his father Zdeněk Svěrák wrote the screenplay from his own autobiographical book and also appears in the film. The same father and son had won the foreign-language Oscar with Kolya in 1996. This film is set before The Elementary School, their first work together, from 1991. The narrative keeps the war in the background and does not break the child's point of view; there is a risk of tipping into nostalgia, and the film mostly gets past it.