Hungarian

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 »

Quote:
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 »

Barbara is a young mother of two in Hungary whose everyday life is abruptly collapses when a friend in Poland dies. Barbara travels to the funeral and meets an actress and experiences an intense love story.Read More »

Synopsis:
Márta, a forty-year-old neurosurgeon, falls in love. She leaves her shining American career behind and returns to Budapest to start a new life with the man. But the love of her life claims they have never met before.Read More »

Quote:
The film presents the wildlife of the Gemenc flood area sanctuary, arranging the episodes of each selected species into little etudes: how the fox steals the chicken from the pen, how the roused deer flees jumping across a huge abyss, how the sturgeon sticks to the bottom of the water, how the adoption of an orphaned fawn takes place. Wildlife is wound into striking novellas by shedding light on the inner life of the forest’s inhabitants.Read More »