A few years ago Czech director Jan Hrebejk mixed farce with the unlikely subject of Nazi collaboration in wartime Czechoslovakia in Divided We Fall. It made for a serious, moving and surprisingly funny movie. Hrebejk's latest film, Up And Down (Horem Padem), tackles the awkward subject of racism in his native Czech Republic with a similar dose of comic relief, but this time he is working without the comfortable distance of six decades of history. The result is a more bitter-tasting satire, although not without some of the elements that made Divided We Fall so watchable.

Hrebejk reveals a growing social unease and racism in modern Prague that surfaces in different guises across the social strata. This leads to subtly humourous, ironic observations on the absurd logic of some peoples' ideas, whether it be a Russian immigrant mother's complaints to her grown up son about the new wave of immigrants, or an upper-class aid worker who is blind to her own patronising attitude toward the people she is supposed to be helping.

The characters in each of the three main stories also cross paths, in a universe that has a habit of playing private jokes on its inhabitants. However, even at its funniest there is an uncomfortable edge to the humour, like when Mila, a desperate, childless woman buys a two-month-old Indian baby on the black market, and brings it home to her husband Franta who is trying to put his soccer-hooligan days behind him. He is at once horrified that his white supremacist buddies will discover he has an infant with dark skin, overwhelmed with a sense of paternal love, and distressed because he knows that the baby was stolen and they will lose it.

The film tries to show both the malaise and offer some hope, although there is a limited supply of the latter. Humour makes the truth more palatable, if ultimately the film ends up suggesting that some things shouldn't be laughed off.