A kaleidoscopic journey through Budapest over the course of a single Sunday, where ordinary moments—work, family gatherings, public parks, bars, and nightlife—become fragments of a larger portrait of everyday life. Eschewing traditional storytelling, András Jeles transforms the city’s routines into an experimental visual poem.
Tag: HUNGARY
ÍGY FOG LEPEREGNI (This is How it Will Play Out) centers on the confession of a woman imprisoned for murder. As she recounts the events leading to her crime, the film moves beyond the details of the case to become a stark examination of justice, responsibility, and the hidden mechanisms of institutional power.
Twenty-year-old Laszlo Sz., a driver’s mate, steals the money he was supposed to post and spends the day wandering around Budapest, visiting bars, restaurants, pinball parlors, and various other places in search of something different and meaningful.
The heroine of this drama played out at the beginning of the Horthy era is a chambermaid who has travelled up from the countryside to work in the capital. Through her vulnerability we clearly see the interdependency of society at that time. Anna moves from paradise to a family lacking in love or compassion, where she loses everything and everyone who once loved her. The director of the film based on the novel of the same name by Dezső Kosztolányi worked out the scenes with absolute precision. Thanks to this and the finest actors of the age, we have one of the most moving films ever made in Hungary.
Adapted by Károly Makk and Zoltán Kamondi from a 1955 work by Tibor Déry, the film follows celebrated writer György Nyári, who unexpectedly rises from his coffin during his own funeral and heads toward the cemetery. As rumors spread about a secret diary exposing the intellectual elite, the story reflects with irony on Hungary’s late Kádár-era cultural circles.
An allegorical short film about the price of freedom. A vast, leafy tree stands in the centre of the field. One ambitious apple on a branch does everything to ripen as soon as possible and break away from the branch that ‘holds it back’, while these restless efforts are viewed with profound contempt by the withered apples around it. The young fruit’s efforts are finally rewarded and while the brief moment of freefall induces euphoria, it ends up crushed by the laws of physics.
KASTÉLYOK LAKÓI shows the clash between old structures and Hungary’s socialist present. “In 1966, I made the documentary KASTÉLYOK LAKÓI about five castles in Gödöllő that used to be the Habsburgs’ royal residence. When I filmed there, parts of the building had been repurposed, converted into an old people’s home and a Russian barrack. Everything was in a very run-down state. Dilapidated palaces in which old, confused people lived who still had their own opinions about the world and fateful stories to tell. And behind them, one can still see the baroque facades and snow-white fireplaces in the film.” – Judit Elek.
A quality war film does not necessarily need spectacular aerial dogfights and bombed cityscapes. Only those movies have truly something to say that go beyond the crack of rifle fire to present personal dramas as well. Ferenc Kósa’s unusual, pacifist war film depicts the hell of carnage in all its senselessness. Characters of this gaunt, tight-lipped story wander through a beautiful landscape seeking their own truth or just the possibility of survival. The film is all the more memorable for the cinematography of Sándor Sára, the powerful screenplay and the acting of, for instance, Péter Haumann.