Mari Töröcsik

Holdudvar (1969)

A woman attends the funeral of her husband after he dies in an airplane crash. She returns home and begins to have feelings of ambivalent emptiness and decides she never really loved him. She contemplates refusing a government insurance policy taken out on her late spouse, a respected scientist. Her son returns home with the girlfriend that prompted his earlier estrangement from the family. The bereaved widow accepts the son and his girlfriend in a conciliatory gesture. When the son discovers his mother may turn down the money, he drugs her and she is imprisoned in a country house. The mother and the girl soon realize the boy may be just like his opportunistic and uncaring father, as both women view the son in a different light. Both women come to the realization that there is life beyond what a man may dictate in this inspiring film of female liberation.Read More »

Hungarian filmmaker Károly Makk was an important figure in the development of Hungarian cinema after WWII. He made his directorial debut in 1954. Prior to that, he attended the Budapest Academy of Film Art and then was an assistant director on Geza von Radvanyi’s Somewhere in Europe. While his films of the ‘60s were well respected in Hungary, Makk’s work did not receive international recognition until 1971, when his Love won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes. Since then, he has gained an international reputation. His 1982 film Another Way was the first Eastern European film to deal directly with gay and lesbian concerns. (Mubi)Read More »

Makk’s haunting, atmospheric and beautifully performed film, brilliantly shot by Janos Toth, captures exactly the fear and uncertainty of the time. It is, above all, a treatise on how such times affect fidelity, faith, illusion, love. It deals specifically with Hungary but has an absolutely universal appeal… completely unsentimental, but catches precisely what its characters face and how they feel…an outstanding film.Read More »

In a rural scenery in the throes of difficult changes lives a humble but promising young farmer girl called Mari Pataki. Her father forbids her from seeing the man she loves. The father, above all preoccupied by work on the fields and prospective wealth, decides to give his daughter in marriage to an old but rich man with whom he does business. Land marries land, he says. This seems to be the unyielding rule of the Hungarian peasantry. But the young lover is ready to stand up to any challenge to keep Maris love.Read More »

This story follows a young student, who is orphaned as she grows to adulthood in the shadow of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Coming from the Communist intelligentsia, she sees her friends and family react differently. Her lover, a married factory manager, supports the patriots and later assists fellow workers in staging a strike. Meanwhile her sister and others express anger at being forced from their homes during the revolution and continue to express a hatred for the rebels afterwards. But in the end they realize that for all people, real life is not possible after the revolt and its brutal suppression by the Soviets and their collaborators.Read More »

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A thoroughly original, delightful comedy with serious undertones, this film is based upon the writings of a famous Hungarian journalist, Frigyes Karinthy. Karinthy, who, in his later years, suddenly became afflicted with a brain tumor, wrote a humorous novel about his thoughts during his illness. A Journey Around My Skull is not only a description of the illness and the great medical adventure of the writer, a strange, constantly unbalanced manner of life, but blends in several characteristics of Karinthy’s earlier works. The writer (played by Latinovits, who won the Best Actor Award at the recent San Sebastian Film Festival for his role here) is placed in pre-war Budapest, during the 1930s, and, while seated in his favorite cafe one day, he hears the roaring of trains. Read More »

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Miklós Jancsó’s Silence and Cry is set during a turbulent era of disquiet, fear, persecution and terror, which permeates every corner of post-WWI Hungarian society. In 1919, after just a few months of communist rule the Hungarian Republic of Councils falls victim to a nationalist counter-revolution. Admiral Horthy, leader of the nationalist far right movement, becomes the self-proclaimed regent of Hungary, and assumes power as the legal Head of State. Soldiers of the short-lived Hungarian Red Army are now on the run from relentless secret policemen and patrol units of the nationalist Royal Gendarme.Read More »