Hungary

Political and sexual repression in Hungary, just after the revolution of 1956. In 1958, the body of Eva Szalanczky, a political journalist, is discovered near the border. Her friend Livia is in hospital with a broken neck; Livia’s husband, Donci, is under arrest. In a flashback to the year before, we see what leads up to the tragedy. Eva gets a job as a writer. She meets Livia and is attracted to her. Livia feels much the same, but as a married woman, has doubts and hesitations. In their work, they (and Eva in particular) bang up against the limits of telling political truths; in private, they confront the limits of living out sexual and emotional truth.Read More »

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A mother and son grapple with the questions of life and death on an inner journey filled with strange stories.Read More »

Gizella Weisz is an middle-aged office worker, who gets a promotion one day. Her boss told her that a new outpost is waiting for her. There she would be heading a new section. She travels from place to another and finally arrives at her new outpost. It is a remote shed, where a half-insane co-worker is waiting for her. It is obvious that Weisz has not been promoted, but punished. However Weisz does not realize that herself. Without questioning she just accepts her promotion.Read More »

PLOT: Béla Tarr’s first full length film is a bleak indictment of communist housing policy; A young couple and their daughter are forced to live with the husband’s family in a tiny flat in which tempers frequently flare. The close camera work and grainy documentary style capture the claustrophobia and indignity of life at close quarters with those you don’t like; the father-in-law is a malevolent Iago-esquire figure, forever whispering conspiracies to his son. The couple are desperate to leave, but, as their meetings with the government officials show, there is no prospect of escape for years to come; This is despite many usable flats standing empty, unused for bureaucratic reasons.. We learn more of the characters as the second half of the film effectively becomes a series of monologues, which further convey what a bleak place 1970’s Hungary was.Read More »

Oh, the good old days when youth built socialism at summer camps and their own “careers”, because college was a good time for taking part in community service. Vera goes to Lake Balaton to go to a peach gathering camp with her lover, Gyurka, who goes to the shores of the Hungarian Sea to film all her friends.Read More »

An old lady, living on memories among the cluttered objects of her past, decides to exchange her apartment for a smaller one. She is thus temporarily brought into contact with other people until, resettled, she once again retreats into isolation.
In this gem of a film, Judit Elek, making her feature debut, builds up a character study and a picture of life in Budapest by the simplest of means: observation of small details. Unlike most Hungarian films seen abroad, it is not a political piece but a study of loneliness and human foibles, given truthful and unsentimental life by one of Hungary’s leading stage actresses.
-Review from Bloomsbury Foreign Film Guide, by Ronald Bergan and Robyn KarneyRead More »

BrandonHabes on letterboxd wrote:
Raw, unpolished social realism preoccupied with loners on the margins of communist Hungary. Tarr returns to the documentary, free-floating style of FAMILY NEST (1979) to examine working class lives struggling to sustain employment, relationships, and economic stability. The family is once again centered as the object of disintegration. One man’s need for family, and his inability to locate it through personal, corporate and artistic spaces, reflects a fatalistic vision of the family, the individual, as well the society that groomed them.Read More »

BrandtSponseller on imdb wrote:
Családi tüzfészek (aka Family Nest) is an intimate portrayal of a family slowly disintegrating under various pressures in late 1970s communist Hungary. The plot of the film is deceptively simple, with the occasional momentous event–including one that’s relatively shocking, but plot in a conventional sense is not the focus here.
What makes Family Nest so masterful is director writer/director Béla Tarr’s skill at suggesting layers of emotion, commentary and meaning through cinematography and staging. For example, early in the film there is an extended scene of the family that is the film’s focus eating dinner in their crowded apartment with some friends. Tarr has the camera crammed in a small room with the cast, necessitating that almost the entire scene is shot in close-ups. Read More »

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Memories and desires of the residents of a Pest apartment block condemned to be demolished swirl through this film by István Szabó. For the director in his thirties, the 1970s was the age of discovery; this work is an experiment at adapting the Modernist stream of conscious film genre for a Hungarian audience. The struggle of the individual against history is a recurring Szabó theme, which in this movie he takes closest to the limits of the narrative form.Read More »