The protagonist of "Picturesque Epochs" is Mária Gánóczy (1927-), a painter and a film aficionado who comes from a family of female artists as far back as her great-grandparents. She brought up nine children with her husband József Breznay (1916-2012), a fellow painter. Gánóczy's films and...
The internationally acclaimed director and recipient of the Erasmus Award in 2007, Péter Forgács created a documentary exploring the fate of hundred thousands of Hungarian men and women who arrived to the United States between 1890 and 1921. To tell their sagas Forgács weaved this grand epic...
Forgacs's Tractatus is composed of seven short video essays that refer to one of Wittgenstein's most influential works, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, first published in 1921.
Venom - A Diva in Exile is based on the short story by writer Zsófia Bán, on the troubling story of Hungarian singer and film star Katalin Karády. She was accused of spying during the war, imprisoned, tortured and banned on radio and in theatres in her home country. After her release, she worked...
In the travelogue "The Danube Exodus," Forgács documents the Jewish exodus from Slovakia just before the beginning of World War II. In two boats, a group of nine hundred Slovak, Austrian Jews tried to reach the Black Sea via the river Danube, in order to get to Palestine from there. Forgács based...
Main character of AZ ÖRVÉNY is cameraman György Petö. His private films shot before and during World War II document his family, and particularly his girlfriend and later wife Eva Lengyel. With hindsight, these films, mainly recorded in the southern Hungarian city of Szeged, make up an...
Angelos Papanastassiou, the man behind the camera, a story of a Greek patrician of WW2 times Athens. In the very first days of the Nazi occupation Angelos decided to record and document the Greece motherland's sufferings. Using a clandestine 16-mm film camera risking daily his own, and his families...
How does the process of film-making—like a huge carpet, of a 250 years saga of the Hungarian von Höfler family—render the chosen subject topical, re-liveable? And what is the topical signifier? is it merely a fleeting (a momentary) décollage — which is neither a piece of news, nor official...
Filmmaker Péter Forgács compiles home movies by a family of Catalan industrialists who have documented their lives as their homeland is besieged by labor unrest, the collapse of the monarchy, the rise of anarchism, and ultimately the Spanish Civil War.
Miss Universe 1929 - Lisl Goldarbeiter. A Queen in Wien
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Filmmaker Péter Forgács' engrossing documentary -- culled from home movies spanning eight decades -- chronicles the life of Austrian beauty queen Lisl Goldarbeiter: the first Miss Universe. Following her during her pageant days and through an imprudent marriage, the film also serves as a slice of...
"Free Fall" reflects to the times before the Shoah, the darkest chapter of the 20th century Hungary, based on the home movies of the talented musician, photographer and businessman, György Pető who made 8mm films from 1938.
Peter Forgacs' Bibo Breviarium (Istvan Bibo's Fragments) is a look at Istvan Bibo, one of the most revered Hungarian philosophers and politicians of the 20th century. The images in the film consist of found footage from the man's life, while the audio consists of an ongoing monologue that...
A young woman in high heels does gymnastics in her garden. “That’s me”, says an elderly voice on the soundtrack. These home movies feature scenes from high society life in Hungary in the 1930s and 1940s. Fifty years on, the unnamed ‘Lady’ of the title reminisces about the dinner parties,...
The Maelstrom makes extraordinary artful use of considerable cache of home movies shot in the Netherlands before and during World War II and dealing with the extended Peereboom family. Information is conveyed through subtitles and instead of voice-over, the soundtrack consists of period sound,...
