By José Alberto Hermosillo
“The Painted Bird” is a monumental achievement and a remarkable cinematic experience—an epic journey through hope and despair. It is among the best movies ever made about the Holocaust. It is simply marvelous!
“The Painted Bird” is a war-survival film that depicts the brutality inflicted on an innocent soul amid the bleak, dark destruction at the start of WWII.
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| The Painted Bird, still courtesy of IFC Films |
“The Painted Bird” surprised audiences at festivals worldwide. Spectators who stayed in the theater appreciated its stunning, pristine 35mm black-and-white cinematography, poetic narrative, and exquisite portrayal of the early life of a vulnerable Jewish boy navigating the dangerous trenches of international conflict.
The stark images of child abuse, mutilation, rape, and human cruelty prompted some attendees to walk out at the Venice, Toronto, and Chicago film festivals. Nonetheless, the film received other prestigious awards, including the Czech Lion for Best Picture and the UNICEF Award at the Venice Film Festival.
Set in several rural Eastern European locations, the intense three-hour Czech production is divided into nine suffocating chapters. Each segment is named after an adult who crosses the torturous path of this nameless six-year-old boy – Marta, Olga, Labina, Mitka, Miller, Priest & Garbos, and others. These troublesome and unruly peasants serve as guardians of the young boy’s faith.
Newcomer Petr Kotlar plays the young boy, who, without hesitation, carries the entire story with remarkable confidence.
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| The Painted Bird, still courtesy of IFC Films |
The boy’s journey begins with a powerful opening—a bullying scene in which the villagers’ children burn his pet alive. When his Jewish father was escaping from the Germans, the family split up—leaving the boy in the care of a blind older woman. The matron’s sudden death foreshadows the boy’s martyrdom.
Throughout the boy’s odyssey, each stop brings a difficult encounter with oppression, abuse, severe physical pain, domestic violence, and sexual assault.
To survive in a harsh world, the boy’s extraordinary mind sharpens his powers of observation. His resilience rests on his ability to stay silent, merely an observer of his own life.
The film was skillfully shot in chronological order over two years. This heroic love story allows viewers to witness the boy’s natural growth, maturity, and development throughout his challenging journey.
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| The Painted Bird, still courtesy of IFC Films |
The universality of “The Painted Bird” lies in its honest portrayal of religion that resonates across beliefs—including Judaism, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Atheism. In the film, faith is linked to Fascism in Nazi Germany and to Soviet Communism in the former USSR. These political ideologies gambled with the lives of millions in Central Europe during the war.
The language spoken in the movie is ‘Interslavic’ or ‘Interslavic Esperanto,’ an international language used in several Eastern European countries, including Poland, Germany, and Russia.
Written by best-selling, award-winning author Jerzy Kosinski, the book was published in the United States in 1965. The story’s provocative subject matter leaves a haunting, lasting impression of discomfort on readers.
Initially, the writer hoped to have the most renowned international film directors of that era, such as Federico Fellini or Luis Buñuel, direct the adaptation of his literary work for the big screen, but the project never came to fruition.
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| Václav Marhoul, director of The Painted Bird. Photo: José Alberto Hermosillo, Festival in LA ©2019 |
Only after Kosinski’s apparent suicide at age fifty-seven did Czech director Václav Marhoul visit a secluded Jewish community in Chicago to acquire the rights to the novel, widely regarded as a significant literary work about the Holocaust, comparable to Anne Frank: “The Diary of a Young Girl.”
Kosinski wrote the novel in Manhattan, drawing on his experiences in Poland. Because of the project’s controversial content, the northern European country sought to distance itself from the novel. The director depicted the child’s journey south of the Polish border without naming a specific country, language, or even the boy’s name or surname.
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| The Painted Bird, still courtesy of IFC Films |
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| The Painted Bird, still courtesy of IFC Films |
Instead of focusing on the series of disgusting images, viewers should see the movie as a relevant document showing how low humanity can sink under extreme circumstances.
For grown men and women suffering the horrors of war, the boy could be seen as an adult, perhaps even as one of their own. They were protective and, at the same time, predatory. Humans tend to hurt what they love most and corrupt innocence with profane intentions and lower instincts, which is human nature.
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| The Painted Bird, Hollywood reception. Photo: José Alberto Hermosillo, Festival in LA ©2019 |
Marhoul revealed at a small gathering in Hollywood that it took him ten years to create his ambitious project, including a full year to secure the author’s rights. He hopes his film will stay in viewers’ minds and hearts for quite some time. It will, because this film is extraordinary. The director’s style is thoroughly academic, and his honesty is impeccable—comparable to Agnieszka Holland’s powerful Holocaust film “Europe Europe.”
Symbolically, Catholics may interpret the boy’s journey as a struggle through the Seven Deadly Sins (Pride, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Greed, and Sloth). The phrase “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth” appears frequently in each chapter. The film’s complexity accurately portrays a boy’s innocent life, the cruelty of his environment, and the historical events that surround him.
“The Painted Bird” is a film I could never forget for its originality and breathtaking images of agony and hope.
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| The Painted Bird Q&A. Photo: José Alberto Hermosillo, Festival in LA ©2019 |
“The Painted Bird” is one of the year’s most acclaimed films. As a result, the Czech Republic selected this remarkable production as its entry for Best International Feature Film at the Oscars. Later, the Academy named this drama among the top ten semifinalists.
This powerful film vividly portrays the horrors of war, the deceitfulness of human nature, and the physical and psychological harm inflicted on children in extreme circumstances. “The Painted Bird” is a work of art about the Holocaust - an exceptional achievement in modern cinema.
The international cast enhances the film’s haunting and heartbreaking impact. Notable actors include Harvey Keitel, Julian Sands, Stellan Skarsgård, Barry Pepper, Udo Kier, Nina Sunevic, and Jitka Cvncarová.
Viewers can complement this poignant film with other classic Holocaust movies such as “The Sound of Music,” “Schindler’s List,” “A Bag Full of Marbles,” or the satirical “Jojo Rabbit.” However, “The Painted Bird” is a hyper-realistic, provocative, and brief depiction of life in rural Europe at the end of the 1930s, dominated by ignorance, superstition, and poverty.
In this story, nothing is intentional; everything is circumstantial. Metaphorically, the title “The Painted Bird” comes from a scene in which a bird breeder paints a bird’s feathers and then releases it. After the bird returns, its flock attacks and kills it. In the film, the young boy is that bird, and the paint symbolizes his instinct for survival. Adults represent his flock, willing to do anything to break his spirit.
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| Václav Marhoul, director of The Painted Bird. Film critic José Alberto Hermosillo, Festival in LA, ©2019 |
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| Film critic José Alberto Hermosillo, Festival in LA, ©2019 |
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