Discoveries from Hungary World Cinema

The scene is Ukraine. In 1943, after the Hungarian' defeat at the river Don, soldier Balogh decides to visit his family.

More than a storyline with a beginning, middle, and end, this tale of a foundry worker who engages a woman -- and fellow worker -- to do housekeeping for him is a tale that holds up the Hungarian social system against the morality of an exploitative male-female relationship. After his wife dies, the rough-cut and intentionally nameless "man" (Jozsef Madaras) eventually coerces the "woman" (Julianna Nyako) into doing his housework for a small remuneration. Everything goes along passably well for awhile, until the man adds in more household responsibility in the form of chickens to raise. Due to extra work at the factory, the woman cannot tend to the chickens as she should and the result is that some of them die. The man is furious, verbally abuses her, and then rapes her. Later, the woman discovers she is pregnant, with dire consequences.

Can we move on if the person we have lived a life with ceases to be with us? Kati moves out of their home after the loss of her husband. As the small apartment that once served the two of them slowly empties, Kati clings to a memory they shared.

Geri’s life flashes before him in the “Buhera Matrix,” a cringe-worthy slideshow of childhood photos from Pioneer camp to prom night. He relives the absurd clash between Mickey Mouse and socialist youth rituals, debates the perfect horse-chestnut hole size and survives the notorious fruit-game initiation. As the disastrous graduation and its Bavarian-style sacrifices cap off his painfully vivid memories, the film spins forward through Hungary’s late-20th-and-early-21st-century history through the eyes of a ’70s-born generation.

The TV film based on the novel by Boris Palotai is the story of a teenage girl's coming of age.

In the tradition of "My Sweet Little Village" and "Waking Ned Devine" FLUKE is a satire about a small village full of colorful characters, whose lives radically change due to a miracle. Or a simple crime.

One summer morning, Anna tells her husband, the writer, that she is in a blessed state, but that she doubts whether she should have a fourth child in addition to the three she already has, because "having children here is, to put it mildly, illogical". This decision is explored in the film as events of the present are interspersed with memories of the past.

We live in an age of unhappiness. Like all people of all ages, we experience our everyday private and public life waiting for redeeming miracles. A bittersweet caffeehouse tale with humor and foam, music and chocolate sauce in 15 minutes.

A teenage girl suffering from a traumatizing injury is tangled in a web of lies trying to manage her studies, her prom night and a boy who might be interested in her.

24 hours in the life of a mother, caught in the relentlessness of daily life, between her work, her home and her children.

A Hungarian-language film loosely based on the 1883 operetta Eine Nacht in Venedig (A Night in Venice) by Johann Strauss II. The film was shot simultaneously while making the German film A Night in Venice (1934). The Hungarian version was co-directed by Robert Wiene and Géza von Cziffra and used a separate cast of Hungarian actors. From Wikipedia.

The story of Bendegúz, the teenage boy who never succeeds in anything and about whom everybody's first though is "I wish you had been hanged when you were born!" drops out of school and becomes a cowboy. He works for the Stationmaster whose cows he has to graze by the railway. Despite his goodwill and kindheartedness he always manages to spoil everything he touches. No matter his wit, he gets into humiliating situations and regularly fights with the Ugly Witch (the Stationmaster's mother-in-law). However his good spirit and cheerfulness never leave him.

"A bus came..." consists of five loosely connected sketch films; the only thing that connects them is that each one is connected in some way to a bus route in Budapest. The mini-films, which are very different in mood and style, were made by Ferenc Török (Shoes), Árpád Schilling (No Comment), Viktor Bodó (Quarter Hour), György Pálfi (Táltosman vs. Ikarus) and Kornél Mundruczó (St. John of 78) with the professional and friendly support of Miklós Jancsó, who also provided the basic idea for the film.

Life is on in the old house of Vizváros. Kids play on the ground. The adopted son of the janitor, Matyi, is hopelessly in love with Juli. He would like to emigrate to America with her. She prefers Janó, the driver, a great womaniser.

The Toth family resides in Northern Hungary. The couple has a daughter and a son, the latter a member of the armed forces. When his weary major is ordered to take a vacation, the son talks him into a visit to his family home. Comedy ensues when the Toths go overboard trying to make things pleasant for the visiting major in hopes of an easier life for their son the soldier.

The police hire a convicted bank robber to crack the Ministry of Interior's vault during the final days of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. But what they find inside is quite different from what they were expecting.

György Dandin, the rich bourgeois concludes a marriage contract with the noblemen Lükeházy couple who has turned poor: he can marry their daughter in return of a regular financial contribution. Angyalka escapes the undesired husband at their very first night, and furthermore she establishes a secret romantic relationship with Count Klitander who suits her a lot better.

A mysterious figure wakes up in the middle of nowhere in a snowy clearing, remembering nothing and tries to find out how he got there...

After the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a young Hungarian, wanted by the police for political crimes, escapes to just this side of the Austrian border. When he discovers that his escape contact has been shot, he disguises himself as a woman and, posing as a maid, takes refuge at a tuberculosis sanatorium. He lives there as a woman for the entire winter before resuming his journey in the spring.

Denisa, a 16-year-old girl, lives in a rural children's home in present-day Hungary. Mark (18) sexually abuses her regularly. One day Denisa meets a man much older than her on the internet. She decides to change her life and runs away with him…

A corrupt young man somehow keeps his youthful beauty, but a special painting gradually reveals his inner ugliness to all.

It seemed like an ordinary day. Dad is experimenting in the lab, Mom is at home boiling water, while their six year old son, Alex is playing around her. But this day is different. This day Dad brings something home from the lab. And the next morning...Alex becomes invisible.

The film evokes the era of the 1831 cholera epidemic and the peasant uprising which followed it. The way of Doctor Balás, cholera commissioner, and district administrator Hunyor leads through the mountains of Zemplén and is lined by unburied corpses, peasants dying of the illness and of overdoses of bismuth, by the miserably starving population, the healthy digging mass-graves and by uncultivated lands.

After the death of his brother, modern-day slave Gábor (50) along with another slave Veronika tries to find his deceased brother’s papers to properly bury him outside the farm. Their captors would want to keep this all quiet and hinder Gábor from doing so.

Anna, a celebrated Transylvanian actress starring at Hungary’s National Theatre in the mid-1960s, falls in love with an Olympic champion she meets at a reception, much to the regime’s displeasure, which has other plans for the multilingual star as an official hostess for visiting dignitaries. As the secret service weaves its manipulative web across every facet of her life, Anna, fortified by her love, proves a formidable opponent to their schemes.

A new teacher arrives at the secondary grammar school. The girls are all crazy for the handsome, blonde young man, except for the most excellent pupil, Balázs Ági. Yet Pali starts paying his attentions to no one else but her.

Richter, Gál and Bakos have stolen valuable paintings from a museum. During their escape, however, they accidentally exchange the black suitcase containing the booty for another. The hunting after the paintings starts.

A tale of vegetarian vampires on this second direct to video release.

A sexually confused person tries to date people in the modern world. Weird things happen

A restless drifter from Istrati’s “Codin” crosses paths in Brăila with a fragile, enigmatic woman reminiscent of “Chira Chiralina“ in interwar Romania.

Tamás, a jaded ad executive, is taken hostage during a gas‐station robbery where both fellow captives and criminals are so unhinged that you never know who holds the gun or when it might fire. No one in this motley crew is who they claim to be, as World Cup commentary blares in the background, a mysterious shipping container surfaces; by the end, even the U.S. president makes an appearance.

A baron has recurring nightmares of being a dock worker on the run.

1942. Owing to a stolen mink coat, Süti, the young poet and journalist, gets acquainted with Katalin, the idolated singer. Before being drafted to labour service, he shows the actress the song he composed for her, entitled Smouldering Cigarette.

A young Los Angeles club DJ, caught between the wishes of his overbearing father and his dreams of musical freedom, uncovers danger, music, a dark family secret and the girl of his dreams, while navigating the sexy and often dangerous streets of Budapest's famous night life.

The science of Pál Varga is famous far and wide: no one can make shoes and topazes like him. The news reaches the court of King Dúlfúl, and the little princess gets it into her head to have him make her a shoe shoe. But her father sends his messenger to Paul Varga, but he is not up to the task, because a lot of poor girls' shoes are waiting to be repaired. Princess Tweety then decides to go to the boastful Varga herself. She dresses up as a maid and goes to the crow. All is well until the young master takes a measure of her. But then he finds that a servant girl who does hard work should not walk on such legs. Tweety reveals herself and finally gets Paul Varga to go to his father's court and submit to the trials.

Enikős and Dorkas marriage is unbearable. Hysterical, cruel and humiliating scenes are enacted in front of the childrens eyes, while the childless Barbara is held by her husband, the painter, to be a toy and sometimes a painting screen.

Dömötör, a headwaiter, and Rudi, his friend, a conductor, are dismissed. Later, they return as guests. Dömötör is seen sporting a false beard, now the spitting image of count Rod-Igor Su-Arezew, the world-famous lion-hunter.

Tita the teenage girl doesn't like her life, so she tries to lie a new, more interesting one for herself. She slips into a world of more lies, parties, drugs and sex.

Theatre Colosseum prepares for the closing performance of the month. The magician Keats wants to avoid having to perform with Jack Carey, the well-known marksman, as the latter has seduced his wife, the beautiful dancer, Silvia Castellani. It is only thanks to the persuasions of Alice McLean, the manager of the acrobat sisters, that he finally decides to do his show. Carey starts wooing the second of the McLean-sisters, Gloria.

Young substitute teacher Rómeó Baradlay suddenly inherits homeroom duties for class 4C and struggles to keep order, only to develop feelings for one of his students.

Sarah, the lonely teenager joins an Internet group which deals with teenagers' emotional problems. Her mentor, who listens to all her troubles, gives Sarah tasks that she has to fulfil to become stronger. The Mentor's tasks get stranger and crueller.

The romantic, fairy tale-like story of the witch of Funtinel mixed with realistic elements - like the author's more important writings - guides the reader back to his narrower homeland, Transylvania. The heroine of the three-volume, voluminous novel is the bewitchingly beautiful girl from the mountains, Nuca. Under the Cathedral, Urszun lives in a strange, round wooden house with his father, the speechless Tóderik. He knows no other law than the law of forests and mountains, nor does he learn goodness from God or in its shadow, but from nature. Her life is not easy, as her father is taken away by the gendarmes, so the ten-year-old girl grows up relying on herself and people's compassion.

The Heroine (1967) was an unfinished and now-lost one-hour adaptation of an Isak Dinesen (Winter’s Tales, 1942) story, directed by Orson Welles. Conceived as part of a proposed anthology with The Immortal Story, the project was abandoned after a single day of filming in Budapest, and no surviving footage is known to exist.

Diplomafilm is a short film that Béla Tarr made to graduate from Art School, in 1981. It is the predecessor of The Prefab People, with the same plot and the same actors, but with some changes in the plot.

1918. Fábián Bálint is forced to kill humans on the Italian front. At home his sons drown the priest, the lover of their mother, in the river Kraszna. Mrs. Fábián turns insane. Following his arrival home Bálint becomes the liveried coachman of the baron.

Our hero, Lajos, a drunken ex-cop in his fifties, back from the jaws of death. His old friend Feri, who is always anxious and wrestling with bad premonitions; and his wife, Etus, who believes in both the omnipotence of love and the afterlife. And, of course, there's their close friend Tibi, in his twenties, who's obsessed with paranormal phenomena and conspiracy theories - especially since his parents were struck by a ball lightning bolt. The four-strong group of friends is bound together by a fascination with esotericism and spiritualism - they are joined by Etus's sister, the recently widowed Évike, who, thanks to Etus's domestic magic, is hopelessly in love with Lajos. Meanwhile, Lajos, who works as a security guard, is in deep trouble: he is granted a two-day reprieve by the underworld-connected art dealer Mr Faragó to settle his debt of millions.

A brother and sister return home from the capital for Christmas to reunite with childhood friends and first loves. They hold a party. They drink heavily. Nothing is the same as before. But everything is good, right?

Dressed as a gypsy woman, Krisztinka Oltay spies, organizes, and takes measures to help Prince Rákóczi and free his lover, Péter Szakmáry. Péter was taken in by his brother, who was loyal to the emperor, and he wants to execute him in Kassa together with the other Kurucs. Krisztinka inspires the tired kuruc troops with a song and Rákóczi's music to capture Kassa and free the prisoners...

A journalist takes a drone footage of a castle, which is under construction, when something unexpected happens.

The only jacket owned by Rédey Lajos, a university student majoring in Italian language and literature, is pawned by his room-mate. The bracelet of Kitty, the daughter of general Gohrmann, which in the middle of a kiss during a lesson in Italian got accidentally unfastened, has been left in the pocket of the jacket. As a result of a still further incident, Rédey, - endeavouring to return the bracelet to Kitty - embarks upon getting the jacket back while wearing the Hungarian gala-suit owned by his landlady's elder brother. The station to which he finds his way while looking for the jacket is visited by the King of Italy, and he takes Lajos, dressed as he is in a Hungarian gala-suit, to be a Hungarian aristocrat, and Lajos must but receive His Majesty in Italian.

The main character begins to feel deeper emotions for a guy, but she is afraid of falling in love again because of what happened before with her first love.

The return journey on a train from a freshman summer camp, where 18-year-old Dóra has just been sexually abused. Now the president of the students' union wants to talk with her.

The Three Musketeers in Africa is a novel written by a Hungarian novelist Jenő Rejtő with the penname P. Howard. It tells the story of Csülök, Senki Alfonz (Alfonz Nobody) and Tuskó Hopkins, the three legionaries . They have to deliver an important letter to Marquis De Surenne and protect a young lady called Yvonne Barre through the desert and lead her to a safe place. Although these three men are outlaws , they try to do everything to help people who are in need. This is a very exciting book with the unique humor of Jenő Rejtő.

A couple of boy gangs in Budapest constantly fight over the neighborhood turf.