IF YOU are still looking for a reason to attend Dublin's gorgeous new Light House cinema, than you could do worse than catch this touching comedy from Poland. Oddly, Tricks recalls an era of art- house cinema that was already ancient history when the first incarnation of the Light House closed in 1996.

Filmed during a balmy summer in a small town some short distance from Wroclaw, Tricks allows the odd glimpse of modernity to creep within the frame: an Italian conglomerate has glassy offices on the outskirts of town; a businessman makes occasional use of his mobile phone. But, for most of its duration, the picture could easily be mistaken for an emanation of the humanist cinema that grew up in eastern Europe during the mid 1960s.

Like so many of those pictures, Andrzej Jakimowski's singular fable focuses on a spirited child trying to make sense of encroaching adulthood. Stefek (Damian Ul) is a mischievous fellow with an unusually close bond to his much older sister, Elka (Ewelina Walendziak).

Seemingly without friends his own age, Stefek, whose single mum works in a local shop, fills his days playing pranks on the citizens of his quiet town. He is particularly focused on a businessman whom he believes to be his estranged father, but also finds time to repeatedly set loose a coop of pigeons kept by some distracted old-timers. The birds appear in the sky with comic irregularity throughout the picture.

The plot, insofar as there is such a thing, hangs around Elka's attempts to secure a job at the faceless corporation. While she learns Italian and hones her interview technique, her brother tails his supposed father and generally gets in everybody else's way. Perhaps he is subconsciously trying to stop Elka securing the job.

Think hard and you could turn Tricks into an allegory about an ancient country's increasingly dynamic relationship with more western parts of Europe - the yellowed cinematography drips nostalgia. But the film works best as a beautifully performed meditation on the universal inconveniences of childhood. It seems that they do make them like they used to.