Hungarian

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Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr began his career making social realist domestic dramas, similar to the work of John Cassavetes. The feature before Damnation, Almanac of Fall, showed Tarr moving toward a more visually stylized form of filmmaking. With Damnation, the first of his collaborations with novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Tarr adopts a formally rigorous style, featuring long takes and slow tracking shots of the bleak landscape that surrounds the characters. Shot in black-and-white, Damnation tells the story of Karrer (Miklos B. Szekely), a depressed man in love with a married woman (Vali Kerekes) who sings at the local bar, Titanik. The singer has broken off their affair, despite her profession of love for him.Read More »

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A traditional Hungarian poetic fairytale that describes the epic adventures of a young shepherd through love, war, magic, and death.Read More »

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The history of Hungarian animation begins in 1914 and carries through to the modern day. Starting with short promotional cartoons prior to the two World Wars, Hungarian animation underwent a sporadic and halting development during the turbulent war years which were characterized in large part by the emigration of much of the field’s top talent. This exodus slowed dramatically during the 1950s when the Hungarian Communist Party took power and the Iron Curtain took shape.Read More »

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Damnation tells the story of Karrer (Miklós B. Székely), a depressed man in love with a married torch singer (Vali Kerekes) from a local bar, the Titanik. The singer breaks off their affair, because she dreams of becoming famous. Karrer is offered smuggling work by Willarsky (Gyula Pauer), a local bartender. Karrer offers the job to the singer’s husband, Sebestyén (György Cserhalmi). This gets him out of the way, but things don’t go as Karrer plans. Betrayals follow. Karrer despairs.Read More »

A bookshop renowned for its rare works is mysteriously and completely filled with copies of a book entitled 1, which doesn’t appear to have a publisher or author. The strange almanac describes what happens to the whole of humanity in the space of a minute. A police investigation begins and the bookshop staff are placed in solitary confinement by the Bureau for Paranormal Research (RDI Reality Defense Institute). As the investigation progresses, the situation becomes more complex and the book increasingly well known, raising numerous controversies (political, scientific, religious and artistic). Plagued by doubts, the protagonist has to face facts: reality only exists in the imagination of individuals.

Based on Stanislaw Lem’s experimental novel One Human Minute.Read More »

A German stage actor finds unexpected success and mixed blessings in the popularity of his performance in a Faustian play as the Nazis take power in pre-WWII Germany. As his associates and friends flee or are ground under by the Nazi terror, the popularity of his character supercedes his own existence until he finds that his best performance is keeping up appearances for his Nazi patrons.Read More »

Quiet and reserved kindergarten teacher Juli (Marta Angyal) and awkward coal miner Tamas (David Janosi) meet during the summer in a small coal-mining town. This French-Hungarian film, part of the Vu Par series, details the problems of their romance, leading to the fateful events experienced by the young couple on the evening of December 31,1999.Read More »

Divided into four sections, “Song” is inspired by the Siberian and Finno-Ugric legends about Creation, in which the world begins with characters who are only half-human, one being half-bird, the other half-bear.Read More »

Set in 1946, this movie deals with the planning and execution of the January, 1942 Novi Sad massacre of 4,000 Yugoslavian Serbs and Jews by Hungarian army units. It was undertaken as a reprisal for a partisan ambush (in which 17 soldiers were gunned down). And it is mainly explored through the reminiscences of four participants–Major Buky, Lieutenant Tarpataki, Ensign Pozdor, and Corporal Szabonow–cell-mates awaiting trial. Ultimately, however, what you get is an extended debate over issues of individual responsibility.Read More »