Starring Kolya Spiridonov. In Russian and Italian with English subtitles. Rated PG. Opens Friday, February 2, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

In a season of dark warnings about the dangers of childhood—the tones range from the local realism of Mount Pleasant to the grim fairy tales of Pan’s Labyrinth—The Italian stands out for being both harsh and oddly calming.

There are no real villains in the film, directed by Andrei Kravchuk from a spare script by Andrei Romanov. Its characters are simply trying to escape the depredations of a country that offers few Mediterranean pleasures. That is certainly apparent to everyone at a Leningrad orphanage where six-year-old Vanya (wonderful Kolya Spiridonov) is being prepared for a shot at heaven—or that’s how it seems when a well-heeled Italian couple comes to adopt him.

The place is no gulag. Shot in a loose, fluid style by Aleksandr Burov, also known for his work with Aleksandr Sokurov, it offers a kind of Jan Vermeer light that halos the children, but without Hallmark smarm. The impoverished orphanage is nominally run by an alcoholic ex-bureaucrat (Yuri Itskov) more arbitrary than mean-spirited. (He tells some kids to “fuck off” while he’s consoling others.) And he depends on the strings-attached largesse of the corpulent woman (Mariya Kuznetsova, who played Catherine the Great in Sokurov’s Russian Ark) running the local kid farm, er, adoption agency.

Everyone’s rooting for Vanya and his big break—the title is his new nickname—and he gets special attention from a teenage kingpin played by the impressive Denis Moiseenko (a newcomer, like the other child actors here). From his boiler-room headquarters, this tenderhearted tough guy runs the joint’s hidden economy as a cross between a genuine Soviet collective and Fagin’s school for scoundrels. He even gets reading lessons from a 15-year-old prostitute (Olga Shuvalova) when she’s not busy with passing truckers.

But with knowledge comes trouble. As little Vanya starts tracking down his own origins, he becomes more interested in finding the mother who abandoned him than in flying off to some land with olive groves and cars that work well in winter.

Clearly, that mother is Russia herself, and even as we root for Vanya to trade potatoes for pasta, it’s easy to understand the desire to find and fix one’s home before giving it up. I could have lived without the film’s plinky piano score, which too often underlines the tale’s sweet sadness. But the children are all marvellous to watch and, despite The Italian’s neorealism (you have to wonder if the title is a reference to those influential films of the late 1940s), it’s rich in something rarer than vodka in the post-Soviet world: hope.