Kolya

Prague, 1988. The cellist František Louka has been thrown out of the orchestra for falling foul of the regime and makes a living playing at funerals. For money he agrees to a sham marriage with a Russian woman. When she flees to the West, her five year old son Kolya is left behind. The two of them share no language at all. Jan Svěrák directs. His father Zdeněk Svěrák wrote the screenplay and plays Louka; Andrey Halimon plays Kolya. The background moves along with the story. This is late 1988, immediately before the Velvet Revolution, and the tension between Louka's anger at everything Soviet and the Russian child dropped into his life is directly political. The film builds it through daily detail rather than sermon. It won the Oscar for best foreign language film and the Golden Globe in the same category. In the Czech Republic it remains among the most loved films there is. The father and son arrangement is how the Svěráks work: Zdeněk writes and acts, Jan directs. They repeated the method on several more films. Who it is for: viewers who like Central European cinema and family drama with a political setting. Who it is not for: the emotional register is high and the last section is openly aiming for tears, and the child is written a little too charmingly.