Hungary

Quote:
A theatre director tries to put on a play with real underprivileged Roma people about their lives but, feeling taken advantage of, the actors leave the troupe to gain a new consciousness.Read More »

Synopsis:
In this refreshing film, Pál Sándor takes the viewer into a girls’ educational institute from the turn of the century. The life of the closed community revolves around strict rules and regularly repeated humiliations, that is, until Emília Odor (Ildikó Szabó) turns up as a new student. Her stubborn, freedom-seeking, rebellious personality thoroughly upsets the well-worn relations. Pál Sándor, director of Régi idők focija/Football of the Good Old Days, Szabadíts meg a gonosztól/Deliver Us from Evil, Ripacsok/Salamon & Stock Show and Szerencsés Dániel/Daniel Takes a Train, once again utilizes his brilliant light touch to sketch out the mood and milieu of a given age, creating heroes with whom it is a pleasure to identify even though they are destined for a tragic fate.Read More »

Synopsis
This urban odyssey begins with a chance meeting on the streets of Budapest, when the two filmmakers run into Sanyi, a charismatic, unruly 8-year-old who constantly tests boundaries and oscillates between childlike innocence and a sober outlook that belies his age. Over the course of over a decade, the camera captures Sanyi’s growing pains in a cramped, dilapidated apartment with barely functioning parents and a baby sister. Charted by a fiery temperament and an inexplicable attraction to danger, the course of Sanyi’s life seems predetermined as he hurtles toward a dark future. Filmed in the spirit of Cinema Verité, this gripping and gritty doc will have you on the edge of your seat from Sanyi’s first breakneck-speed skateboard ride to his inevitable plummet down the rough roads of adulthood.Read More »

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In a post-apocalyptic Hungarian-Ukranian village where everything is rotten, Ocsenas is the one who helps everyone out. He is only living hero trying to survive against savages and war while inside a love triangle that will define his future.Read More »

Historical drama, based on a true story, set in Vienna in 1847. It revolves around medical pioneer Ignác Semmelweis, a short-tempered but passionate Hungarian doctor struggling to find a cure for a mysterious fever that is killing patients—mothers and their babies—in the maternity ward he oversees. His considerable ambition and his research method soon draw the disfavour of his superiors, who order him to stop. They even enlist a young midwife named Emma to secretly spy on him. After a turbulent first encounter, the relationship between Ignác and Emma grows into something more than merely professional. As the fever spreads and with half his peers discrediting him, the tenacious doctor carries on his fight to discover a cure, with Emma by his side. Meanwhile, outside the hospital walls, a social powder keg of political and revolutionary forces is about to explode.Read More »

Kornél Mundruczó’s second feature uses improvisatory techniques and memorable imagery to tell this story of youngsters sweating out one summer in a small Hungarian town.

Péter (Tamás Polgár) is just out of prison and is unenamoured with life on the outside. When he witnesses a woman secretly giving birth on the floor of a laundrette, it sets in motion a tricky emotional triangle composed of himself, the child’s mother Maja (Tóth Orsi) and his sister Marika (Kata Wéber), with whom he seems incestuously close.Read More »

Quote:
A downbeat, hypnotic retelling of Mankind’s story from Adam and Eve to the present, played entirely by children. But don’t expect a romp — these kids are deadly serious as they tackle issues of mortality, religion, and the struggle of class against class. Brilliant photography enhances the deliberate pacing, yet the film is never boring. Literary sources include Emily Dickinson and William Blake, and every line is delivered with full conscious intention. Especially effective is the Byzantium sequence, where a single syllable (homousios, or homoiousios) means the difference between life and death. Seldom has the narcotic influence of religious power been so effectively portrayed. The use of a cast composed entirely of children is a conceit that lends itself to preciousness, but here it succeeds without the least trace of “cuteness”. In sum, a daring, challenging, and ultimately worthwhile experiment.Read More »

This strange Hungarian film is a cross between a “candid camera” documentary and a surreal fantasy. The film’s two actors impersonate traveling portrait photographers visiting a small Hungarian village. There is an uncanny congruence between the peasants’ favored forms of photographic expression and the antique photographs that they are shown as examples of the kind of work they can hire. This becomes unsettling as the film shows the peasants of today investigating pictures of the peasants of yesteryear and looking exactly the same.Read More »

The Fifth Seal (Az ötödik pecsét) is a 1976 film by Hungarian director Zoltán Fábri based on the 1963 novel of the same name by Hungarian author Ferenc Sánta. It won the Golden Prize at the 10th Moscow International Film Festival and it was entered into the 27th Berlin International Film Festival. It tells a story set in the closing days of World War II in which five friends meet in a local cafe in Hungary. When one of them makes a disparaging political remark that is overheard and reported to the Arrow Cross soldiers, their own beliefs about freedom and dignity are tested when they are imprisoned, tortured and offered freedom only if they slap the face of a dying Communist partisan.Read More »