Beautiful Film

This is one beautiful powerful emotional (and funny) film, and it rightfully deserved the Oscar for best Foreign Language film it received in 1997.

And its base, it may seem like another 'been done before' type of film; a womanizing bachelor is forced to become a father-figure to a cute little kid. But there is so much more depth to this film, and unfortunately, a lot of it is lost in translation. Unless you speak Czech, you won't fully understand the play on words done between the Czech-speaking Louka and the Russian-speaking Kolja, where certain words sound similar, but have completely different and ironic meanings. And unless you grew up in a communist regime, the subtle emotions and feelings the actors showed may not be so obvious.

And I'll admit this is one of the few movies than has been able to bring a tear out of me. When little Kolja is crying in the bathtub, 'I want my grandma!' shortly after she passed away, the lump in your throat will really sting you.

Czech cinema hit its peak during the 'Prague Spring' of the 1960s, before the Soviets clamped down hard on all the newfound free speech, but a film like Kolya shows the world that Czech film industry is still alive and well, even after being suppressed for so many years.

10/10