We never learn if he is familiar with The Railway Children, but, for whatever reason, six-year-old Stefek (Damian Ul) decides that a commuter he often sees at the train station in his desolate Polish town must be his long-lost father. Apparently having no friends to distract him, Stefek tries to engineer a series of seemingly accidental events that will cause the man to leave the station and wander into a meeting with the boy's mother (who is just as unaware of this plot as the commuter). The slightly-too-calculated cuteness of Andrzej Jakimowski's film didn't induce any warm fuzziness in me, but the neatly crafted plot kept me engaged. Seeing whether Stefek's plan falls into place is like seeing how things work out in a heist movie.
12A, 96 mins