Hungary

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A strange, beautiful and critically-acclaimed film by Gyula Gazdag, A Hungarian Fairy Tale begins at a performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute where a beautiful young woman meets a handsome stranger and, transported by the music, they share one night of love. The son born of this magic night is raised by his mother but at the age of three, must be given a father’s name, even a fictitious one, according to Hungarian law. Years later, the engaging Andris sets out to find his “father” as his “father” begins a separate journey.Read More »

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In 1947, just before the communists took over Hungary, Dorottya (Eva Igo) is thrown out of school because she was found with Communist materials. Her lover is a Communist and she decides to join his party cell just to be with him – and then finds herself falling in love with the cell’s party leader. The feelings are reciprocated and it does not take long for the couple to make a commitment and begin a family. After the Communists take over, Dorottya’s husband disappears during the purges – and it looks as though her former lover were culpable in his presumed death. When Dorottya finds work in a factory as a cleaning woman, she runs into her old lover and he swears he had nothing to do with her husband’s disappearance. Resigned and disilluisioned, Dorottya begins to despair as she imagines how life will be for her alone, under a Stalinist regime, and unable to find a decent job.Read More »

The maverick Hollywood stylist André de Toth sharpened his craft in his native Hungary, including making this chic, dynamic melodrama, studded with deco decor and jazzy musical interludes. Two upwardly mobile working women—one a musician in an all-girl band, the other a bricklayer—join forces in their attempts to make it in Budapest, supporting each other through changing fortunes, the advances of lecherous men, and the highs and heartbreaks of love. Kinetic camera work, brisk editing, and avant-garde imagery abound in this often strikingly modern ode to the power of working-class female solidarity.Read More »

Synopsis: An aspiring film student is denied a scholarship to the state-funded university when his father is thrown in jail. The man had stopped a train in order to facilitate the union between two old friends. The son then takes a job as a land surveyor and meets a Greek man who works towards the collective benefits of the peasants. The man is killed in a peasant uprising prompted by a bureaucratic boondoggle. The surveyor looks after the man’s widow as his emerging political and social awareness leads him take a stand against government injustice. Another incident, in which gypsies are rounded up by state hygiene workers, further galvanizes the man’s beliefs. He photographs the incident, and his work allows him to be accepted into the school from which he was previously denied admission.Read More »

Teréz (Mari Törőcsik) has hit 40 and after her divorce she feels life to be empty and void of purpose. Although those around her do everything they can to help through these difficult times, she slips further into lethargy. This film by Gyula Maár is outstanding for accurately registering the tiniest of spiritual flickers, building on the acting sensibilities of Törőcsik and the incandescent intensity of Lajos Koltai’s camerawork.Read More »

Two actors wandered from house to house in the countryside in the roles of the photographer and the retoucher business man offering their photographic services to the people.Read More »

Synopsis: A talented but irresponsible violinist ruins his marriage with his drinking and antisocial behaviour.Read More »

PLOT: During WWII, a young Hungarian captured by the Soviets is left in the custody of a young Soviet soldier to assist him on a dairy farm.Read More »

A boy in Budapest loses his father in 1945, when he was the age of six. He does not remember much of the father but fantasizes that he performed various heroic feats.Read More »