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The Painted Bird
Shot in lustrous black and white, Czech writer-director Vaclav Marhoul's stark wartime drama is an adaptation of Jerzy's Kosinski's 1965 novel and claims to be the first feature film entirely in the Interslavic language, which was created to facilitate communication between people from different Slavic nations. The horrors of the Second World War are witnessed through the eyes of a nameless Jewish boy (Petr Kotlar), who is sent by his parents to live with an aunt to evade the clutches of the Nazis. Alas, the aunt dies and the boy must fend for himself. He seeks temporary sanctuary in the company of strangers including a miller (Udo Kier), bird breeder (Lech Dyblik) and Catholic priest (Harvey Keitel), who treat the tyke with varying degrees of kindness and contempt. Far from home, the boy discovers that the greatest threat to his life might not be the Germans but his countrymen and women.
