Thirty years ago, a grumpy Prague cellist and a five year old Russian boy conquered the world. Kolya premiered in 1996, went on to win the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, and became the first Oscar winning film of the independent Czech Republic. Three decades later, it has lost none of its warmth.
Kolya (Kolja, 1996) is a true family affair: Zdeněk Svěrák wrote the screenplay and plays the lead, while his son Jan Svěrák directed. František Louka is an aging bachelor and cellist who lost his place in the Philharmonic and scrapes by playing at funerals. To pay his debts he agrees to a marriage of convenience with a Russian woman. She soon emigrates, and Louka suddenly finds himself with something he never wanted: her small son Kolya, who speaks no Czech at all.
What follows is one of the most tender stories Czech cinema ever told. Zdeněk Svěrák gives a beautifully restrained performance, little Andrej Chalimon is impossible not to love, and the film quietly grows from comedy into something much deeper, all against the backdrop of the last months before the Velvet Revolution. Libuše Šafránková, Ondřej Vetchý and Stella Zázvorková complete a cast of pure gold. 
Kolya was the third Oscar for Czech and Czechoslovak cinema, after The Shop on Main Street and Closely Watched Trains, and the first one won under the Czech flag. If you want the whole story of that first golden statuette, read our article about The Shop on Main Street.
Both editions in our store carry English, French, Italian and Finnish subtitles, so this is a film you can genuinely share across generations and languages: on Blu-ray or on DVD.
🎬 Celebrate 30 years of Kolya on Blu-ray
👉 More from the Svěrák family? Explore the Jan Svěrák Collection, and read our portrait Zdeněk Svěrák: the writer who makes Czech humour feel like home.
🍁 And one more piece of news for Svěrák fans: the new Svěrák film Five Plums (Pět švestek) arrives in our store in mid October, on both DVD and Blu-ray. Watch this blog, we will bring you the whole story.
