The Painted Bird

An unnamed and stranded Jewish boy, whose family has probably been exterminated, washes from one nightmarish episode to the next, in a pitiless chronicle of an era red in tooth and claw. An adaptation of the titular 1965 bestseller novel of the Polish-American writer Jerzy Kosiński, which unravels the excruciating ordeals of a minor struggling to survive in the no-man’s land of post-World War II Europe. A searing and brazenly brutal drama, shot in lush black-and-white 35mm that plumbs the depths of human hell and stares at the abyss, before letting a tiny glimmer of hope slip in.