The Painted Bird

During the Second World War a Jewish boy, never named, is sent by his family to the countryside in Eastern Europe for safety. The old woman caring for him dies and the house burns. The boy sets out alone. What follows is a sequence of encounters from village to village, each worse than the last. Václav Marhoul writes and directs, from Jerzy Kosiński's 1965 novel. The most striking choice is linguistic. So that no nation could be marked as the villain, Marhoul had the dialogue written in Interslavic, a constructed common form of the Slavic languages. The speech on screen therefore belongs to no actual country. It took nine years to make and was shot in black and white on 35 mm. Stellan Skarsgård, Harvey Keitel, Julian Sands, Barry Pepper and Udo Kier appear. It competed at Venice in 2019, where a substantial number of people walked out during the screening. The film was reported through that fact, and the argument over whether the violence is necessary or exhibitionist has never ended. Who it is for: viewers who can take hard war cinema and formally rigorous adaptation. Who it is not for: violence against animals and children and sexual abuse are shown directly, and across nearly three hours there is no relief.