A 16-year old boy with an angelic face and a freshly stolen jacket arrives at the main train station in Prague. He's immediately spotted by a man called Honza, who asks him if he wants to earn some quick cash. The boy is too naive to realise that he's being set up as a prostitute.

Honza drugs him and delivers him to his first trick. The boy wakes up in the room of a homosexual client who has just had sex with him. Shaken, he takes his payment from the man and returns to the train station where Honza demands his cut.

Other hustlers spot the boy as a new kid in town and demand taxes from him, He can't pay, so they beat him up. When Honza sets up a second client, the boy goes along with it. It has only taken a few hours to make a prostitue of this boy....

Mandragora is Wiktor Grodecki's compelling dramatisation of his documentaries, Not Angels But Angels and Body Without Soul. It is a disturbing and graphic portayal of teenage boys struggling to survive in the ruthless Eastern European world of sex, drugs, teenage prostitution and porn.

"The day the koruna has the same value as the mark will be the day the last paedophile comes over here" - Petr Zebasko. co-ordinator of investigations into youth crime in the Czech Republic. - The Guardian

A Czech film with English Subtitles