Countries & Movies: Czech Republic

Czech (not to be confused with Czechoslovakian!) cinematography is represented in the Golden Thousand by one film - Jan Sverák's picture "Kolja (Kolya)".

The film was released on the screens of Czech cinemas on May 15, 1996. In the same 1996, the film was awarded the Grand Prix of the Tokyo International Film Festival. The film was also nominated for the European Film Academy Award for Best European Film of the Year, but lost that award to Lars von Trier's "Breaking the Waves".

A year later, Jan Sverák's film was nominated for the British BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Language Film, but British film academics left the Czech film without an award, presenting the award to the French film "Ridicule" by Patrice Leconte. But in the same 1997 "Kolya" received both the Golden Globe and the Oscar as the Best Film in a Foreign Language, although the nominees in both cases included the same "Ridicule" and the Russian film "Кавказский пленник (Prisoner of the Mountains)" by Sergei Bodrov.

Reviews of the film from professional film critics are generally very positive, although not without reservations. The most typical rating given by film critics is 3.5 on a 4-point scale. And, as is typical, most Western film critics, from Roger Ebert to Janet Maslin from The New York Times, primarily highlight the political overtones in this film. Russian film critics pay more attention to the human relationship between an inveterate bachelor and a little foreign boy.

67% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users rated this movie from 8 to 10.

Taking into account the above, the rating of the film "Kolya" according to FilmGourmand's version was 9.313, thanks to which it took 95th Rank in the Golden Thousand.