The Kite (2019)
★★★½ — The Kite (2019)
Short films occupy an odd space in the conversation about cinema. They're easy to overlook, awkward to programme, and rarely get a fair hearing outside of festival circuits and curated streaming platforms. Yet some of the most concentrated, affecting work being made anywhere in the world right now is happening at that runtime, frequently coming out of Central European animation schools with budgets that wouldn't cover a single day's catering on a Hollywood production. Josep is one example of that tradition done beautifully; The Kite is another, and it arrives from a corner of Europe with a genuinely distinctive visual heritage.
The Kite (original title: Šarkan) is a 2019 animated short film running to approximately thirteen minutes, directed by Martin Smatana and produced as a co-production between the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia, with institutional backing from FAMU, the Prague film school that has trained some of Central Europe's most respected filmmakers across the past several decades. Smatana, working in a handcrafted animation tradition that draws on textile and embroidery aesthetics, brings a very particular visual sensibility to the material. The film has no credited star cast in the conventional sense, relying instead on atmosphere, imagery, and a spare soundscape to carry its story of a young boy, his grandfather, and their shared ritual of flying a kite as the seasons pass. It is the kind of film that gets made because someone had something genuine to say and found exactly the right form in which to say it, as opposed to the polished but unremarkable output that tends to dominate animation as a commercial genre. For a sense of how Czech co-production culture operates at a grittier, feature-length register, it's worth looking at Anthropoid and Aferim!, both of which connect to the Czech Republic in different ways and both of which demonstrate the range of tonal and formal ambition that the region's filmmakers can bring. Animation as a format for handling grief and loss is not new territory, of course (the history of the form is full of films that use fantasy and abstraction to approach subjects that live-action struggles to hold), but it remains relatively rare to find it done with this degree of restraint and precision. The Hunchback of Notre Dame is an example of animation working at enormous scale and ambition within the family space; The Kite operates at almost the opposite extreme, whispering where others might shout.
A-Z World Movie Challenge Slovakia The Kite (Sarkan), the 2019 short film, is a quiet, deeply moving piece about grief, memory, and the fragile threads that tie us to those we’ve lost. In just around 15 minutes, it says more about love and absence than many feature-length films manage. The story follows a young boy who flies a kite with his Grandad. A simple object that becomes a vessel for remembrance, connecting him to someone gone too soon. There’s little dialogue, but you feel everything through the silence, the gestures, the way he holds on. The art style is stunning. hand crafted animation with a soft, embroidered quality that feels both dreamlike and painfully real. Colours shift with emotion: warm golds for memory, cold blues for loneliness. Every frame is composed like a poem. And the soundtrack (minimal, haunting, built around a simple motif) elevates the emotion without ever overpowering it. Together, they create a sense of intimacy and sorrow that lingers long after it ends. It’s not a film about closure, really, but about connection. About how a place, a toy, a breeze in the trees can bring someone back, if only for a moment. It’s subtle, tender, and beautifully respectful in its sadness. Brief, but unforgettable. A small masterpiece about the weight of what’s left behind.
What strikes me most, sitting with it afterwards, is how much the film trusts its audience. There's no hand-holding, no explanatory voiceover pulling you towards the correct emotional response, just image and sound and silence working together in a way that feels genuinely earned. Films that deal with bereavement often feel the need to tidy things up, to offer some kind of resolution that sends you out feeling, if not exactly comfortable, then at least settled. This one refuses that, and it's the better for it. I suspect it'll stay with me considerably longer than a great deal of things I've watched this year that cost a hundred times more to make. Sometimes thirteen minutes is all you need.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2019 | Watched: 2025-09-04
Where to watch
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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)
