Hungary

“It’s the rawness of the film that makes us believe we are unquestionably seeing the truth.”

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

A heavy going realistic slice of life domestic drama that is filmed in black and white. It’s a followup to Béla Tarr’s other domestic strife tales Family Nest and The Outsider. This one keys in on marital strife. It’s about a struggling young couple’s confrontations and their own inability to freely communicate with each other. Tarr was evidently influenced by the works of Ranier Werner Fassbinder and John Cassavettes.Read More »

Synopsis:

This story takes place in a small town on the Hungarian Plain. In a provincial town, which is surrounded with nothing else but frost. It is bitterly cold weather – without snow. It is twenty degrees below zero. Even in this bewildered cold hundreds of people are standing around the circus tent, which is put up in the main square, to see – as the outcome of their wait – the chief attraction, the stuffed carcass of a real whale. The people are coming from everywhere. From the neighbouring settlings, from different holes of the Plain, even from quite far away parts of the country. They are following this clumsy monster as a dumb, faceless, rag-wearing crowd. This strange state of affairs – the appearance of the foreigners, the extreme frost – disturbs the order of the small town. The human connections are overturning, the ambitious personages of the story feel they can take advantage of this situation, while the people who are condemned anyway to passivity fall into an even deeper uncertainty. The tension growing to the unbearable is brought to explosion by the figure of the Prince, who is pretending facelessness and is lying low behind the whale. Even his mere appearance is enough to break loose the destroying emotions. The apocalypse that sweeps away everything spares nothing. I does not spare the outsiders wrapped up in scientificness, does not spare the teenage enthusiasts, the people who have philistine fears for ease, the family – nothing that the European culture preserved as from of attitude in the last centuries.Read More »

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Director Istvan Gaal’s feature film debut was well received in the international community as well as his native country, Hungary. Sodrasban/Current is about a group of young people who have vacation around a small town. They spend their time playing around, taking life lightly. One day while they are diving at a nearby swimming area, they discover that one of their friends is missing. After an extensive search for the boy, his drowned body is eventually found and identified. This tragic incident changes the children’s perspectives of their lives as they now consider their own mortality, marking the end of their youthful innocence.Read More »

This film was nominated for the Oscar Awards in 1969 as the best foreign language film.

The film originated from a novel created by the Hungarian writer Molnar Ferenc in 1906.
The book was chosen as a class reader in Hungary for children aged 11.

About the book from Wikipedia:
“The book has earned the status of the most famous Hungarian novel in the world. It has been translated into many languages and in several countries (like the UK and Italy) it is a mandatory or recommended reading in schools. Ernő Nemecsek is now ranked there among the eternal heroes of youth literature like Oliver Twist or Tom Sawyer. The novel can be easily read in most parts of the world as if its story could have happened anywhere and in any age.”
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Quote:
From the pen of famed Hungarian novelist Peter Eszterhazy comes this erotic tale of passion and betrayal. Lili, a young gypsy girl, falls madly in love with a dashing salesman who introduces her to life’s sensual pleasures. When Lili discovers he is engaged to another, her life begins to spiral downward into unending sexual liaisons and an unsatisfying marriage. Eszterhazy wrote the novel under the pseudonym Lili Csokonai–the main character–so the story unfolds through her eyes, like an autobiography. The film’s complex weaving of flashbacks and memories perfectly captures Lili’s haunted perspective on her life as does Tibor Mathe’s beautiful cinematography.Read More »

SYNOPSIS: The title of Child Murders has a chilling double meaning. In this black and white melodrama about children, the child murders that the film’s title refers to are the million and one ways that children’s souls are ravaged by neglect, unkindness and cruelty, even though several physical deaths take place in the story. 12-year-old Zsolt lives a lonely life with his grandmother. He spends so much time taking care of his grandmother, that he has little time for much else. However, he makes friends with Juli, a homeless young gypsy woman living in an abandoned railway car. This friendship becomes known to the other children in his circle, and results in his being actively ridiculed, ostracized and beaten. When Juli has a miscarriage and Zsolt helps her dispose of the baby’s corpse, they are seen by one of the hate-filled local children, who notifies the police. The gypsy girl is taken to a prison hospital where she hangs herself. Zsolt quietly takes his revenge on the informant.Read More »

A boy’s sleep disturbed by the weaking, and the sound of reality. Found-footage montage with the chemical reactions of the celluloid on rare erotic s8 reels.

23. Festival Premiers Plans d’Angers – free forms section (2011)
MADATAC Video Art Festival, Madrid; 2011
8. International Super8 festival – Szeged: Best hungarian film; Audience award; 2009
41. Hungarian Film week: Award of the most promising young talent; 2010
The Canton Palace Theatre First Annual International Film Festival – Ohio ; 2010
Kalgart underground evening, Istambul; 2010
An evening with Cinema 16,- The Kitchen, New York (2011)
San Francisco – MisALT series – 2011Read More »

Jutka, a young woman who works in a factory, falls in love with Andras, a university student. She pretends to be a student, to him and to his parents, and begins to live a lie. Finally she rebels against Andras and his demands and the social conventions that forced her to live a lie.Read More »

Based on a popular, partly autobiographical novel, Another Way traces the developing relationship between Eva, a sparrowlike but determinedly uncompromising journalist from the provinces who is overtly lesbian, and Livia, a beautiful, restless fellow journalist unhappily married to an army officer.

Director Karoly Makk’s considerable achievement here is his interweaving of two controversial themes–lesbianism and political repression–into the historic context of the still-sensitive period following the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Another Way skillfully treats the lesbian affair as a mirror for a wider discussion of public and private freedom.Read More »