The Kite (2019)
★★★½ — The Kite (2019)
Fifteen minutes. That's all it takes. Fifteen minutes, and I was quietly devastated.
The Kite (or Sarkan, to give it its Slovak title) is one of those short films that makes you question why you've spent so long watching features twice its length that manage to say far less. It's a film about grief and memory, told through the simplest of images: a boy, a kite, and the grandfather he's learning to carry with him. There's barely any dialogue. There doesn't need to be. Everything worth saying is in the silences, the gestures, the way small hands grip a string that connects them to something that's no longer there.
The story itself is stripped right back, and that restraint is the whole point. A kite becomes a vessel for remembrance. A breeze through the trees becomes a presence. The film understands something that takes most of us years to learn: that grief isn't really about absence. It's about the ordinary things that ambush you, the objects and places and small rituals that suddenly carry the full weight of someone you've lost. It gets that, completely, and it trusts the audience to feel it without spelling it out.
What stops this being merely affecting and makes it genuinely stunning is the craft. The animation has this soft, hand-stitched quality, something almost embroidered, that feels both dreamlike and bracingly real at the same time. It reminded me, in the best way, of illustrated storybooks that carry a kind of emotional truth picture books sometimes reach and novels occasionally miss. The colour palette does enormous work: warm golds wrap around the memories, and cooler, lonelier blues bleed in when the boy is left alone with his loss. Every frame is composed with the care of someone who understands that in animation, nothing is accidental. Every choice is a choice.
The music matches it. Minimal, haunting, built around a motif that keeps returning like a half-remembered tune you can't quite place. It threads through the film without pushing, without telling you what to feel. It just sits alongside the images and lets the emotion build on its own terms.
I've been working my way through my A-Z World Movie Challenge, and Slovakia wasn't a territory I knew well on screen. Finding a film like this for it felt like a genuine gift. It's the kind of discovery the challenge was made for. I had a similarly unexpected emotional response working through Central and Eastern European cinema with Josep, another short animation that finds extraordinary depth in memory and loss, and if you responded to that one, this belongs on your list immediately.
What I keep coming back to is the film's refusal to offer comfort on easy terms. This isn't a story about closure, and it never pretends to be. It's about connection, about how the people we love don't fully leave because they live in the objects they touched and the habits they shared with us. The kite doesn't bring the grandfather back. But flying it brings the boy closer to him. That distinction matters, and the film holds it with real tenderness.
Brief, unforgettable, and beautifully restrained in its sadness. Four stars.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2019 | Watched: 2025-09-04
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Amazon Video
Buy: Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Rent: Amazon Video
Buy: Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon US
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Czech Republic: Van Helsing (2004) · Underground (1995) · Aferim! (2015) · Anthropoid (2016)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More animation: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)
More family: Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Wonder (2017) · Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anastasia (1997)
