Father
A Slovak drama about a father who, after leaving his two-year-old daughter in a sweltering car, finds himself caught up in every parent’s worst nightmare.
On an unusually hot day, Michal is supposed to drop off his two-year-old daughter at the nursery before heading to work at a company threatened with bankruptcy. Six hours later, Michal realises that he hasn’t left his daughter at the nursery at all, but has forgotten her in the hot car – but by then, it’s already too late. This tragic mistake shatters the life of the devoted father. As the threat of prison looms, he begins to question whether he deserves to go on living. But when he and his wife come to see that the tragedy was not a personal failure, but something rooted deep in the architecture of the human mind, a fragile path toward forgiveness begins to emerge. Can love survive what no heart was built to endure?
Father masterfully depicts the psychological torment of a young father through an unflinching close-up camera. It is a harrowing, but moving and empathic film about lifelong guilt, false memories and learning to live again after a tragedy. The film had its world premiere in the Orizzonti section at the Venice International Film Festival and was selected as the Slovak entry for the Best International Feature Film category at the Academy Awards.