Straddling the line between drama and comedy, Hostage focuses on two child protagonists – the son of a Communist official and a little boy left behind by his parents, who emigrated to the West in the mid1960s. Friendship, life’s first great discoveries, love, rows between rival gangs and great expectations are juxtaposed with “grown-up” reality. This difficult-to-understand, bizarre, even absurd world of adult relationships and attitudes, a labyrinth of strange words, deeds and displays, as well as the kind of incomprehensible phenomena a politician’s child is confronted with, such as emigration, betrayal and death, drive the young “hostage” to make an outlandish decision. Hostage was the third collaboration between successful writer Peter Pišťanek (1960–2015) and producer Marian Urban. The film received four Czech Lion nominations: Best Actor (Milan Lasica), Best Supporting Actor (Ondřej Vetchý), Best Editing and Best Art Direction (Pavol Andraško).