This film will leave you short of breath. It's told with a pressing urgency and fierce passion, and features brilliant black and white photography and some fantastic camerawork. You can almost smell the sap from the trees and pine scent in the air as the camera rushes up slopes and through gulleys at breakneck pace.

"Near-surreal Czech movie that puts editing to amazing use to depict the minds of two boys trying to escape the concentration camps... Quite effective at times, creating almost surreal absurdities out of mixing civilization with animalistic, desperate or cruel behaviour."

Pretty impressive and aesthetically advanced considering it's mostly just two kids walking in the woods...

This film gets me all riled up.

There's some really impressive touches and striking, resonant images here, expressing a genuinly impressionistic notion of reality and articulating the nervous desperation and indeterminate memories of the main characters... But I was not engrossed by this dizzy flow of cloudy images, not absorbed in the bewilderment of time and place and psychological anxiety.

An unusual holocaust film, very quiet and somewhat impressionistic, with a sense of time purposely disrupted by non-linear montage-style editing. Though not the top of the crop, it's a classic representative of the Czech New Wave.