Meanwhile, the kindly Orban becomes tired of the tyrannical bureaucracy, and decides to destroy the files of children he has helped to legitimize by giving them fictitious fathers.

American television critic John Leonard wrote that the film is a "parable of lost identity, and an antisocial escape fantasy, and a sly subversion of the nonprofit police state, the machinery of official fictions ... but the payoff is irrational, and all the lovelier for it ... what happens to Andris and his outlaw friends in the film is, more or less, what happened to the cherubim in The Magic Flute, to Pascal Lamorisse in The Red Balloon ... your heart will fly up too.

"[2] American film critic James Monaco said that "although state paternalism is director Gazdag's enemy here, the movie is lighter in tone and more direct in its emotional appeal that most of his previous work ... a deft combination of old Hollywood texture and luminosity and 60s new wave freedom, and surreal fantasy atmospherics, the film may have already lost its topical bite, but the structure underlying it, the simple myth at the complex heart of things, is made to last.

[5] In his review for the Chicago Reader, Kurt Jacobsenan noted the film is an "uneasy and highly effective mixture of realistic narrative and surrealistic odyssey ... here bureaucracy bites the dust and an orphaned boy ultimately takes wing to a never-never land of family bliss ...shot superbly in luminous black and white, the film is a captivating accomplishment even if the subtle allegorical (antiauthoritarian) dimension is ignored.

Gazdag’s droll and stinging style is muted, the better to highlight an ambitious and nearly archetypal rendering of the quest for a sense of identity and for an unmanipulated milieu to live in.