Mandragora

Marek is fifteen and failing at school when he runs from his village to Prague. He is robbed almost as soon as he arrives, then picked up by someone promising work, taken to an apartment, and pulled into an arrangement with no way out of it. With his friend David he plans to put a little money aside and go home, and going home turns out to be much harder than saving the money. Wiktor Grodecki made this after two documentaries on the same subject; it is the fiction leg of that trilogy. The material is heavy and the film neither softens nor decorates it. What it shows is how tourism, poverty and the abuse of children ended up on the same Prague street in the years after 1989, without nominating anybody as a rescuer.