Tibor Malkáv is an andaverage 37-year-old man, who though not rich, leads a comfortable and uncomplicated life. All this changes when he finds out his mother is dying of cancer and the cost of surgery is well beyond his means. A one-eyed man known as the Cyclops offers Tibor a solution to his...
Savanyú and his friend work at a plant. After the monotonous shifts they engage in the pleasures of the afternoon and the night, i.e. parties and concerts. Savanyú dates Juli, they are already engaged. The young men live as sub-tenants, the young women in workers' hostels. None of these places...
In 1960s Hungary, an introverted teenager’s life is turned upside down by a few days in the company of his coat hanger salesman uncle: a roguish charmer with a zest for life and a weakness for horse racing and women.
Two old women who happen to be pickpockets stole money from Simon, the taxi driver. The police are unable to find the thieves, so Simon decides to find them himself.
1985. Hungary has elections for the first time since long where more than one candidate is allowed to run. The engineer Bodnár is the most popular man in the rural town, who has defended the microclimate of the neighbourhood against a harmful project. Before the elections he is also put on the...
Sweet Anna is sent as a maid to the Vizys immediately after the fall of the revolution in 1919. Since the death of her daughter, Mrs. Vizyné has devoted all her emotions and energy to the "education" of the servants. Anna is sometimes pampered, sometimes humiliated. Her nephew Jancsika seduces the...
Inspired by García Lorca's stage poem, this is the story of a young woman who cannot realize her desire for self-realization either in the confines of her Andalusian village or in her relationship with her traditional husband.
The film is a historic parable about the topicality of revolution. 1514. The peasants' uprising is over, Dózsa has been arrested. Werbőczy tries to get the imprisoned peasant leader deny the revolution and offers him the lives of his people in exchange.
The corrupt leaders of a small rural town learn that an auditor is coming from St Petersburg. Frightened, they try to put things in order. Hlesztakov, a Petersburg official, has been starving for days in his inn in the small town, having gambled away all his money and no credit. In a...
Paul Bogár is released after a year in custody on suspicion of burglary - due to lack of evidence. The man seems to accept society's declared norms, taking a hard physical job in a factory. In his spare time, however, he resumes burglarising houses, carefully and without a trace. He gives the...
Using high-school students, Hungarian director Ferenc Kardos re-created the 1848 revolutionary period in that country's history which was dominated by the poet/soldier Sandor Petofi (1822-1849). Petofi wrote many epic poems which inspired Hungarian nationalism, the most well-known of which is Up...
This film is a documentaristic dispute about the possibilities of young people to assert themselves, to make a career. Zsuzsa is a third-year university student studying pedagogy. She has been dating Zoltán for three years, and her thinking has been fundamentally shaped by this relationship. Yet...
At 15 he and his family became victims of state terror. At 16 he became a freedom fighter to participate in the 1956 Revolution against Soviet oppression. At 17 he is betrayed and arrested by the dreaded Secret Police (AVH). Now he has to spend the remainder of his life in a political prison,...
One day Novák Erzsébet kindergarten-teacher destroys her papers, cuts her hair and closes her mouth forever. She prepares for suicide namelessly, then somewhere around Normafa she accepts being taken into an asylum.
Few writers today tackle sweeping, multigenerational family sagas, work that demands vast life experience and insight. József Attila Prize–winner Árpád Thiery has done just that: his two published volumes of the Freytág Siblings’ story (1943 through the late 1960s) have been adapted by...
The sisters have been living in a Soviet barracks in Hungary for eleven years. They long to go to Moscow, but they are drawn here by habituation and inertia. Their father, the brigade commander, is dead, yet they are unable to act and prefer to remain in the closed world of the barracks. So the...