A deliberately Modernist script by members of the Prague Linguistic Circle intercuts the fate of children assigned to the regimen of an experimental reform school and life outside in the impersonal city. Written collectively by the Surrealist poet Vitezslav Nezval, the pedagogue Miroslav Disman, and the structuralist Roman Jakobson, the film combines genres and procedures to subvert psychological conventions. Vancura's characters exist as symbols of ideas, often frozen in mannered isolation: unconventional camera angles focus down on the actors, making them seem like specimens in a social laboratory; costumes are pointedly stylized; the functional environments, designed by architect Bedrich Feuerstein, are curiously illogical. With an obvious debt to Soviet montage, an open-ended narrative is created by stunning vignettes that succeed each other connected only by their intensity-a maniacal puppet show, a Hitchcockian tango on top of St. Vitus Cathedral, etc. On the Sunny Side displays a rarely achieved complexity of visual and sound syntax that compares favorably to the work of later practitioners of the avant-garde, from Buñuel to Pina Bausch.