The Painted Bird
(2019)

AKA: Nabarvené ptáce

Country: Czech Republic

Genre: War Drama

Synopsis

Somewhere in Eastern Europe, a young Jewish boy struggling to survive World War II wanders across the countryside, where he meets all kinds of horrors on the part of xenophobic, superstitious villagers and cruel, violent soldiers.

Notes

• Based on the 1965 novel of the same name by the Polish-American novelist Jerzy Kosinski (1933-1991)
• This is the very first film to feature the Interslavic language, with nearly all the film's dialogue being in Interslavic. The Interslavic language is a constructed language designed to facilitate communication between speakers of diverse Slavic languages. The director of this film, V?clav Marhoul, decided that the movie's script should be in this language so that the Eastern European country in which the plot unfolds would remain indeterminate.
• This film has been the recipient of numerous awards at international film festivals. At the 2019 Czech Lion Awards (held in 2020) the film won 10 awards, including the prize for Best Film. However, the movie's brutal scenes led to walkouts from audiences at the Venice, Toronto and London film festivals.
• The title of the movie and novel derives from an incident described in the latter in which a man paints a bird he has captured several colours before releasing it to find a flock of its kin. When, however, the painted bird finds its kin, they see it as an intruder and viciously attack the bird until it falls from the sky.

Reviews and Other Resources

• Watch the Trailer (w/ Eng. subs) on YouTube
• Order Blu-ray/DVD from CzechMovie