Festivals are so focused on films that are innovative, provocative or exotic, that a well-made classically-told drama is almost always underrated in such a context. If it is not about ordinary people with universally recognisable emotions, then it almost has to be a ‘sentimental TV film’. Kolya by 31-year-old Jan Sv+k+rák is able to break through this scepticism. You realise that you are watching a beautifully-made piece of cinema of the kind that seemed extinct. Czech film-makers were once famous for the tragi-comic realism with which they were able to watch human behaviour, but that angle seems to have been lost since 1968. In Kolya we see this approach again in a story about a womanising musician who got into trouble in 1988 through a political statement and is then lumbered with the care for a Russian boy who has been deserted by his mother.Pieter van Lierop.
