Kolya

Jan Svěrák's Kolya won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1997 (the second Czech film to do so, after Closely Watched Trains three decades earlier) alongside the Golden Globe in the same category. The film consolidated Svěrák, after his earlier The Elementary School, as one of the most internationally exported post-Communist Czech directors. Zdeněk Svěrák, the director's father, wrote the screenplay and played the central role; Andrei Chalimon, the child lead, was cast at age five from a Russian-Czech amateur talent search.

František Louka (Zdeněk Svěrák), a confirmed-bachelor classical-cello player in late-communist Prague (moonlighting as a cemetery-headstone restorer because his contract with the Czech Philharmonic has been cancelled by the regime for political reasons) agrees to a cash-for-passport marriage with a Russian woman seeking Czech citizenship. The woman promptly disappears west, leaving Louka to raise her five-year-old son Kolya through the final months of communism and the Velvet Revolution. Libuše Šafránková plays Klára, Louka's longtime girlfriend.

The film operates simultaneously as character study, contemporary Czech political-historical document of the months preceding the November 1989 Velvet Revolution, and intergenerational comedy. The film's central child performance, anchored by Chalimon's natural screen presence, and the father-son chemistry of Svěrák and Chalimon combine into one of the warmest works of post-Communist Czech cinema. Vladimír Smutný's photography of late-communist Prague produced one of the most distinctive recent Czech-language registers.