Winter Flies

Within the road movie genre, this movie is totally brilliant. It fulfills all the requirements for pieces with similar themes where the main characters are an incongruous duo approximately 15 years old give or take 2 years and they are unbelievably authentic and make you interested in where they are going, why they are they going there and what happens during their trip. However the beginning and the end of this movie is not so great. For its running time of 85 minutes, this movie is quite fast paced; I would even say a bit too much. The introduction to the story is absent – you fall into the story and immediately get to like these boys even though you will quite often disagree with them. The story also lacks a proper ending, which means that for example the story line at the police station loses all meaning. Everything just ends with the movie title all over the screen... (23.09.2019)

Family Film was a lot more hardcore art. Winter Flies, on the other hand, is a very spectator-friendly and relaxed road movie about freedom and liberty, but with an obvious social level and with the motif of a boy's coming of age. At the beginning, it is relatively difficult be on the same level as the film, because its main protagonists are a pair of teenage hooligans who imagine freedom mainly as car theft, running away from home, shooting at cars from an airsoft rifle and contempt for authorities, which the film feeds by presenting adult characters as careless and irresponsible individuals or as untrustworthy con men. Over time, however, you can finally empathize with the story and its characters, mainly thanks to the constantly-dosed light humor and the very natural acting performances of the main protagonists. In any case, freedom and relaxation have seeped into the structure of the film and some specific plot aspects, which seem very crude, whether it is the division of the story into two timelines told out of sequence, or the way in which one of police officers is "removed" from the police station for most of the film. (03.07.2018)

I only watched the film because I was curious about the winner of the Czech Lion Awards. Well, Hastrman was brilliant compared to this. This pointless wandering of two teenagers didn’t impress me much (except for certain moments). The length of some scenes was clearly exaggerated and the constant cutaways to nature imagery reminded me of spring water commercials. I did like Lenka Vlasáková in the film, though. She would probably break many a Czechoslovak partisan. (29.07.2019)