Joseph Kilián

A bizarre, consciously Kafkaesque allegory in which a young man wanders the streets of Prague fruitlessly searching for a man called Joseph Kilián, of whom no one seems to have heard. Passing a state cat-shop, he impulsively hires a cat for the day, only to find, nightmarishly, that the shop is no longer there when he tries to return the cat as required. Wittily poking fun at the personality cult (a huge portrait of Stalin looms over a roomful of frayed agit-prop posters and Cold War slogans), Jurácek and Schmidt scarcely put a foot wrong in evoking the incomprehensible mazes - simultaneously absurd and terrifying - of totalitarian bureaucracy.