A haunting and restrained portrayal of abuse, Broken Voices confronts the culture of silence with poetic visuals, live choral music, and quiet emotional force.
Sometimes dreams can also bring in pain; enduring and dealing with the emotional turmoil then becomes part of your life. Ondřej Provazník’s Broken Voices (Sbormistr) was part of the Crystal Globe competition at the 59th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF). It is a film which confronts you with the stigma of being part of sexual abuse and harassment and living with it.
This film is loosely based on the true story of the ‘Bambini di Praga’, a Czech children’s choir mostly made up of girls and involved in sexual abuse scandals in the 1990s.
Set in 1992, the film shows us the fragile transitional years of post-socialist Czechoslovakia. The film is ostensibly about a children’s choir, its discipline, its touring dreams, its almost religious devotion to music. But under that polished surface lies something much darker: a slow-burning story of trust, manipulation, and the invisible fractures caused by authority gone unchallenged. It’s not about one act of abuse; it’s about the culture of silence that enables it.
The story revolves around a teenage girl (Kateřina Falbrová, who also won a special mention at Karlovy Vary) as a promising girls’ choir singer who captures her choirmaster’s attention (Juraj Loj), to the scorn of the rest of the members of the group, including her sister (Maya Kintera). It traces her emotional journey with her feeling of elation and flattery that gradually gets diluted into feelings of shame and guilt towards the end of the film. The filmmaker’s handling of the delicate situations in the story makes you connect with the character and her inner conflicts.
The film, shot in 16 mm, is a visual poetry; it maintains the nuances of restraint, the atmosphere, of haunting undercurrents throughout the film. There are no big accusations, no graphic outbursts. What we get instead is tension carved out in gestures: hands held too long, a room gone too quiet, a face turned away.
The film has a lot of outdoor shots in different weather, which mirrors the protagonist’s internal transformation. Spring carries the innocence of choral harmony, summer brews discomfort, winter is stark and isolating, showing us the emotional pacing through the landscape. The mountains, the grey Czech skies, the sterile beauty of New York skyscrapers—each place marks a step deeper into the truth.
Besides the fantastic cinematography, what takes the film to greater heights is the choir music and the sound, which here in the film is text as well as the emotional weapon: from the choir’s ethereal harmonies recorded live (no playback), sung by real children’s choir members, we can feel it in the sound—strain in the high notes, unspoken histories in their synchronized voices. The director uses music both as a source of uplift and as a method of manipulation. The cast is largely composed of non-actors, and that choice pays off. There is a rawness to their expressions, especially in the lead performance.
What makes Broken Voices remarkable is that it doesn’t try to resolve itself. There is no grand confrontation. No satisfying conclusion. Just a lingering unease, a challenge to the viewer: What would you have done? Would you have noticed? Would you have spoken?
We are thrilled to be reporting directly from the Czech Republic at the 59th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.
