Archived: The Painted Bird

The Painted Bird

Nabarvené ptáče, feature film, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Slovakia, 2019

DIRECTED BY: Václav Marhoul

CONTENT:

A boy aged 11 or 12, of Jewish or Roma origin, roams the ravages of devastated Central and Eastern Europe during World War II. The boy was left alone after his grandmother died and his house burned down, only to soon become the target of other boys in their village, who beat him up and killed his dog, due to his religious and ethnic background. He found a short-lived roof over his head in a woman who insisted on calling her aunt, even though they may not have been related, and she fed him. But after the woman’s death, the boy will accidentally set fire to her house, leaving him without minimal security. He therefore decides to embark on an anxious odyssey through the Slavic part of Europe, at a time when human life is utterly worthless. Already in the neighboring village, he is sold as a demon to a witch, whom he will help in the treatment of superstitious peasants. And when the witch falls ill, he will be rejected, and he will reach the house of a sadistic miller who will brutally dig out his assistant’s eyes with a spoon, concluding that he is in love with his wife. But all this is only a part of the boy’s suffering, because he will soon end up with a man who feeds the wings of birds out of fun, knowing that other birds from their flocks will tear them apart, and then he reaches a good Nazi and finally a good-natured priest.

In 2019, she won the UNICEF award at the Venice Film Festival, the same year she was awarded at the Chicago Film Festival, and in 2020, in addition to winning the Jury Award for Best Director in the Main Program of Belgrade FEST, she was also awarded the most prestigious Czech Film Award. , including those for best film, director and photography, the extremely provocative and disturbing war drama by screenwriter and director Václav Marhoul (Tobruk) is an adaptation of the famous and controversial novel of the same name by Jerzy Kosiński. For a novel published in 1965, Kosiński claimed to describe the true events that happened to him during World War II, but later it turned out not to be true, as the writer spent the entire war in one Catholic family. Despite this, the prose that Arthur Miller and Ellie Wiesel declared one of the most important on the subject of the Holocaust, while at the same time Eliot Weinberg accused the writer of not being the real author of the book because he did not know English well enough to write it at the time of writing. it is a work characterized on the one hand by a pronounced intrigue and provocation in the desire to shock the reader with scenes of bestial violence. On the other hand, it is a novel that has been criticized for its inauthenticity and anti-Polish orientation, while Kosiński has been criticized for its pathos, sadism and a kind of pornography of violence. In this context, director Václav Marhoul very plastically conveys scenes of extreme violence, wanting to present the well-known phrase about the “banality of evil” Hannah Arendt. But the accumulation of suffering and bestiality very quickly becomes counterproductive, especially in the context that it is self-serving, as it lacks any character building and progression of the protagonists, just as other characters are immutable in their initial default, all resulting in viewer resistance to expanding bestiality. Supporting characters are played by famous and distinguished character actors such as Harvey Keitel (Hardened Lieutenant, Tank Dogs, Piano), Stellan Skarsgård (Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Nymphomaniac, Chernobyl series) and Uda Kiera (My Private Idaho, My Vampire Shadow, Son , my son, what have you done?), but they are also to some extent used and too easily spent.

B / W, 169 ′

27th Czech Film Week

The program was implemented in cooperation with the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Zagreb.

All films have Croatian subtitles.

Ticket price 20 kuna, for members 10 kuna.

Due to compliance with the new preventive measures and avoiding multiple cinema entries, tickets can no longer be purchased in advance, but only on the day of the screening.

When entering the cinema, it is mandatory to wear a mask, visitors’ temperature is measured, and before buying tickets it is necessary to leave your personal data (we collect them only due to the epidemiological situation, respecting the GDPR rules).