A Certain Kind of Silence

Mia is hired as an au pair. She knows she’ll be looking after a 10-year-old boy, but that is all. Yet her very first meeting with the family suggests that she is expected to do rather more than this. She has to pay the price for a life of high financial and intellectual reward by following a set of strict rules whose infringement would result in instantaneous dismissal and a ticket back home. However, it would also mean abandoning a child she is trying to reach out to and losing her self-respect. Michal Hogenauer’s feature film debut examines the strength of an individual’s resilience to manipulation and the extent to which people are willing to make sacrifices in order to preserve their self-esteem. (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)