The kids in Miroslav Janek's Kha-chee-pae, a documentary about children growing up without parents, inhabit an urchins' idyll in their unnamed Moravian town. Ranging in age from 3 to 18, the kids wait — be that wait for the parents who left them behind, for new guardians or for adulthood, when they'll be turned out, housing assistance and job placement provided.

Janek's film takes viewers inside the imaginary worlds of these children, who are burdened by memories of parents and pasts they recall sometimes vaguely, often wistfully. They face futures the audience can imagine, but about which the children are clueless. They frolic with fantasized dwarves, parent their baby dolls. They play roles.

"Where do you think I've been?" a boy asks, taking the part of a wife addressing her husband. "I'm stuck at home cleaning while you're at the bar. You're such a disgusting drunk."

"Doof, doof, doof," the same boy responds, delivering a two-way dialogue and approximating the sound of the man punching his wife. The husband's onslaught culminates when he kicks the woman — who is pregnant, it turns out — in the stomach. "I'm going for a beer," the man says.

Kha-chee-pae — anglicized from "Chačipe," one of the children's chants — is one of two 2005 Janek films premiering at Archa Theatre this week. The other, Vierka, or The Mystery of Family B's Disappearance, tells the story of Vierka Berkyová, a 12-year-old Romany sprite who comes to the Czech Republic with her family from Slovakia. The family's sudden fortune — a new home and a budding singing career for Vierka — unravels in the face of misunderstanding and cultural conflict with the people who've taken the family in. Vierka and her family depart suddenly, leaving it all behind.

Like Kha-chee-pae, Vierka is a story of nontraditional upbringing and cultural misunderstanding. It, too, tells the tale of a child's resilience.

Modest hopes

To get an authentic view of the Kha-chee-pae children, Janek, 52, left a camera in their hands on a number of occasions while he was away, allowing them to capture their world as they saw it. The end result is a 55-minute movie, more than 20 minutes of which was filmed by the children themselves.

"Ada, do you remember why you left your mom?" one of the home's adult "aunts" asks a young girl at one point in the film.

The girl guesses it was because her mother didn't have the money to raise her and her younger sister, who also lives in the home. Ada doesn't remember when she last saw her mother. She only knows that she got a postcard once, and that she's written her mom three or four times since, with no response. Their mother writes them or doesn't, visits or not, still loves them or forgot them — none of it changes where Ada and her sister find themselves.

"For this group of kids, I don't think the film will do much," Janek says. His ideal result is that viewers might take inspiration to help other children caught in similar situations.

"I could hope that if somebody sees the film he might think, 'Well, maybe they are not all just growing up to be criminals and homeless.' Maybe it's a guy who is living around the corner from a children's home, and maybe he says, 'Maybe I can visit them; maybe I can play soccer with them.' Any relationship from the outside, any kind of activity, is good for them."

He tempers his hopes with pragmatism, though. "It's a partially naive ambition on my part," admits Janek, who first picked up a camera when he was 14. (His first film was three minutes of fresh snowfall on mountain trees with a Bach soundtrack.) "There is a prevailing opinion that kids from children's homes grow up to be criminals and homeless and alcoholics. So with this prejudice, it is difficult for most people to change their mind."

Unanswered pleas

So it goes. Abandoned by their parents, prematurely shunned by the world outside their doors, the children can only invent the lives they want to live and wonder about the lives they might have had.

"You know I'm not mad at you, and I swear I won't be mad," Ada writes to her mother, begging her to return. Later, she'll write to the "social lady" and ask her to reunite her family.

Janek had to make several concessions to capture such moments in the childrens' lives. None goes by his or her full name in the film, and the town and home they live in remain nameless as a buffer against potential legal action. He screened Kha-chee-pae for workers at the children's home and made changes according to their concerns.

"It didn't really change the film, but we had to do it," says Janek, who emigrated to the United States in the 1970s after he was unable to attend film school here because his family had fallen out of favor with the Communist Party. "Of course, the kids didn't have any requests. They don't think like that. They only look where they are on the screen."

Toward the end of Kha-chee-pae, Ada pitches a fit when an expected visit by her mother doesn't happen — though it's unclear whether the visit was imagined or actually planned. "Fuck!" she yells, before breaking down. "Mom, mommy," she sobs. She scribbles a dispatch, begging her mother to "write a letter, at least."