Ondřej Provazník’s Broken Voices (2025) begins where prestige makes abuse harder to recognize. The film draws from the scandal surrounding Bambini di Praga, once one of the Czech Republic’s most admired choirs, and its conductor, Bohumil Kulínský.
This was a respected part of Czech cultural life, with deep roots in the country’s choral tradition and enough prestige to shape the training of performers who would later matter in Czech music. The abuse at the center of the story emerged from a place built to inspire pride and, above all, obedience.
Broken Voices, screened at the Sofia International Film Festival (2026), stays close to a girl’s point of view. Karolína (Katerina Falbrová) enters the story still visibly attached to childhood, evident in small gestures and domestic habits. She wears a childish fringe and shares a bedroom with her sister under a warm yellow light.
Those early scenes keep her shyness intact. Karolína still lives in a world where talent seems tied to goodness, and effort still seems likely to lead somewhere clean. Inspired by her older sister Lucie (Maya Kintera), a member of the proud Canticella choir, music offers orientation and a way of becoming someone.
At first, Broken Voices seems close to the demanding-teacher drama, even to Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash (2014). The choir master, Vít Machá (Juraj Loj), first appears wrapped in the protections of artistic authority, the kind of man whose results have long insulated him from scrutiny. He handpicks Karolína for her raw talent, fulfilling a dream the girl did not know was possible. Provazník is after something quieter and more corrupting than that model allows, breaking any easy parallels with actors Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons.
This becomes clearer as the story narrows the girls’ world. Home remains warm, shared, and recognizably childish. Rehearsal rooms belong to a stricter, yet still intelligible, order of collective labor.
The retreat changes everything. A smaller group is pulled out of ordinary life and placed in an environment where isolation sharpens competition. The choir is deciding who will travel to the United States, and the stakes rise because the tour is the highlight of the year’s performances.
Now the characters are surrounded by snow, the weather is freezing, and discomfort becomes the norm. By then, home, rehearsal, retreat, church, and the hotel room all seem to belong to the same pressure.
Machá remains plausible for too long. He does not suddenly harden into an obvious monster. Slowly, the choir master softens his tone and begins to enter the girls’ emotional lives as though intimacy were simply another register of instruction. In doing so, he places both Karolína and the viewer inside a much harder question than whether a line has been crossed.
Because of the bad weather, the staff and singers frequently use the sauna to decompress and stay healthy, then shock their bodies by stepping outside in their towels. On a particular night, Karolína runs into Machá and, caught off guard, shyly accepts his invitation to join him in a sauna session.
In that environment, the sauna still looks ordinary enough to give him cover. Katerina Falbrová is excellent here. Karolína feels flattered by the attention and unsettled by it almost at once, without yet knowing what to do with either feeling. The viewer stays there with her, already sensing that something is wrong.
From that point on, the bond between the sisters starts to shift. When Karolína steps outside, Lucie locks her out in the freezing night. Why would the one person who should have protected her act in such an ugly and childish way? Broken Voices wisely refuses to reduce it to a single motive. Jealousy is part of it, and maybe even resentment. By then, competition had already entered the sisters’ bond.
When Karolína falls ill and returns home, stricken with pneumonia, the damage has already entered her body. The director suggests that Lucie may be trying to protect her sister, and that this is the only way she knows how. Provazník holds the scene in tension and never lets it tip into melodrama.
Inevitably, everything culminates in its ugliest climax on the American trip. The sisters are selected, and the dream appears to have been ratified. At a moment of vulnerability, Machá leads Karolína to his room and deliberately sexually exploits the 13-year-old girl.
When this violation comes, it reaches the viewer indirectly, and the indirection does not relieve our discomfort. The camera remains fixed on the doorway, and the cinematography stays steady, without extravagance, keeping the shot continuous. We see only the characters’ feet on the bed, while the reflection on the switched-off television screen offers a frontal view of the scene. The dead screen catches the act without giving it the relief of drama. Around it, the room stays offensively plain: daylight, open curtains, nothing in the image trying to dignify what is happening.
Karolína does not fully understand what is happening, and Broken Voices is exactly about that delay between a traumatic moment and eventual understanding. Indeed, recognition arrives later, during a church performance, when her body collapses before her mind can reorganize the event into language.
She sinks and clings to another girl; at that moment, an earlier remark comes back to her with devastating force. During the selection period, an older singer had told her to hold someone’s hand in church so that, if she fainted, she would not hit the floor. The line had seemed strange when first spoken, even incidental, but it now opens the institution from within.
Broken Voices suggests that this had happened before, and that the girls already knew what to do when one of them gave way. Knowledge was already moving among them before language caught up. When Karolína breaks down in church, the structure around her becomes harder to ignore. The assault in the hotel room was only the act itself. The institution had prepared its aftermath long before.
An ethical problem remains around any fiction drawn from a still-painful public scandal, especially one whose victims remain close enough to that history to be hurt again by its transformation into art. Even so, Provazník has made a film that avoids sensationalism and gives up the comfort of innocence. By Broken Voices‘ end, the institution has already made room for what it claims not to know.