Discoveries from Hungary World Cinema

A tableau of the most famous Hungarian beat bands whose fans speak about what music means to them, while some aging people explain why they think this savage type of music should be banned, censored, or at least played without drums.

Six-minute uncut romantic drama.

Vanessza, the young roma girl is getting prepared for the chance of her lifetime, a prestigious boxing-tournament. The road is long from the small countryside gym to the tournament, but with the help of her trainer, they may be able to go against all odds.

Tired of their strict music teacher, students commandeer their bus and flee to the woods, where they take up residence in abandoned Russian barracks.

Short silent film.

Student Gábor and cigarette-smoking student Mujkó sneak into the Buda rose garden of baba Gül and fall in love with Leila, the daughter of baba Gül, who is bathing there and is destined to be the 33rd wife of Ali Basa. The guard captures the student and death awaits him and his companions.

With this 32-minute short film, based on Ernest Hemingway's posthumously published book A Moveable Feast, György Fehér commemorated the author, who died 75 years ago. In the film, Tamás Cseh - one of his earliest film appearances - sings live the lyrics of the song, which are only sung in this film. This was the first time György Fehér and he worked together.

Shot in 1972, this remarkable documentary was released ten years later and had its first Western film festival screenings last year. "Gyula Gazdag is an outstanding Hungarian talent who seems to specialize in getting into trouble. This film, which he made with Judit Ember, another alert and sensitive director, was banned for ten years. In it, a rural community is in financial trouble and an expert from Budapest is sent to advise and reorganize. He is successful but his manner angers the local committee. Despite their own management failure, they feel his arrogance should be the subject of a reprimand at least. The story is more than just true: so sure was the community of its cause that Gazdag and Ember were invited to film the actual debate, and the reality makes us protagonists in the case. It is a situation that could happen anywhere but seldom has such a subject been treated in so absorbing and striking a way.

This light comedy with grotesque elements tells the story of M, the young and beautiful model mother, who seeks happiness and a father for her precocious, but inventive daughter, Tündike.

Kati, a fragile, sixteen-year-old teenager and Sándor, a twenty-two-year-old young man get married defying their parents' and friends' objections. They spend their wedding night in a bunk-house, and then, trusting the strength of their love, they move in a boathouse on the Roman beach of the Danube.

Mózes Imre, the quality inspector of a big factory in Budapest loses his job overnight because he did not obey the director's instructions and refused some bad products of the company. When he brings the case before a court his arguments are not really appreciated. The director, however, recognises that, to a certain extent, Mózes is right and lets him re-enter as a head of a smaller operational section.

Lost in the foreign city of Budapest, a solitary Chinese man finds his place in the world not through words, but through a single, unexpected moment of human connection.

SUPERMAN is an early performance experimentation with video as mirror.

The satanic horde pouring into the city tries to break the everyday peace of Debrecen, but their leader, Dark Master, is at the top of the blacklist of the Debrecen mafia due to his annoyingly disadvantageous business offer.

Mária, a 55-year-old plastic surgery addict and lonely nail technician, one day finds her young love, Kalman, on Tinder. Soon they arrange a meeting, but because of her disfigured face, he has no idea that she is about to go on a date with her former lover. Mary does her best to keep her true identity hidden and to appear as perfect as possible in her new look.

Metaphor about art, about time, or how art uses the artist's life in his quest to create his work, in which he was pouring his talent, his vigor, and the best years of his life.

Documentary about the life of József Béres.

A featherball match gets interrupted and that condludes to a horrible event.

The great actor hurries to his dressing room after the raging success. He gets rid of Othello's costume and mask. He is trying to find his way back to himself. Does it have its own face?

She creates time lapses, he is into slow motion. Is it possible to meet in time?

After a long night, Dj Feaky D loses a large sum of money on poker. When an old friend offers a "great opportunity of easy money", he calls up on his buddies locked away in a mental institution.

The intellectual family Faragó lives a bit busy life, but ensures complete autonomy for its members in a tiny flat in Budapest, while the newly rich Belvizis in the neighbourhood have a luxury apartment and a conventional and purposeful life, sentencing their only daughter for solitude.

During a New Year's Eve fireworks display, a girl loses her dog and has to spend the first day of the new year looking for it.

The story follows our protagonist (with no name, played by Miklós Galla), who loses his season ticket on the bus. The quest for said item is filled with bizarre encounters with retarded cabbies, cannibalistic station guards, trigger happy busdrivers, kinky buses, a homicidal maniac running amok…

The documentary-feature film taking place in the seventies is the "development novel" of Cséplő György, the intelligent and ambitious Gypsy boy. Having finished only two terms at school, the eighteen-year-old boy leaves Németfalu with two of his companions to find employment in Budapest and to break out of his miserable existence in the village cottage with the help of his small savings.

A documentary about the early life of the Roman Catholic Bishop of Alba Iulia, Áron Márton.

A teenage kid breaks his own moral rules, because of self inspiration and the spirit of the team. Afterwards he tries to get rid of this obsessive feeling of compunction and the evidence as well.

A Hungarian rural gypsy settlement in the present day, in a fairy-tale landscape of rolling hills and greenery. A teenage boy is preparing for an important dance competition with his friends, so he makes a pact with the alleged devil. The real inner battle is just beginning

The cooper's daughter, Zsuzsi, is being wooed by Peter. Her father doesn't want to hear a word of it, as Peter drinks heavily. Before God, Peter vows never to drink again, and thus wins the hand of Zsuzsi. Peter becomes a hard-working man, earning the envy of the whole village. A conspiracy ensues-- the men get him drunk, and soon, Peter's life spirals out of control.

Seven years have passed since we left our Director disappear in the purple fog somewhere on the Hungarian Puszta along with his faithful fellow, the D.O.P. This year a hard disk has been found, proving that their appetite for creation did not fade. Or did it?

This Hungarian documentary explores the life and career of Olympic Pentathlon champion Andras Balczo. After winning five gold medals in the event, he retired at age 34. He was offered lucrative positions as a coach in many countries but elected to remain in Hungary, despite the fact that he was never permitted to train anyone there.

Susanna Egri is a 97 year old ballet dancer and teacher and choreographer. She is originally Hungarian, but living in Turin, Italy. Her autobiographical choreography Snapshots was the first transmission of the Italian state television RAI in 1953. In this piece she treated the three biggest traumas of her life: 1. She had Jewish origins and was almost killed in Hungary in 1944. 2. Her father, Ernő Egri Erbstein was a famous football trainer of the Grande Torino and died in a plane crash with all the Torino football team in 1949. 3. Her unsuccessful marriage with her Italian husband. During the shooting Susanna was working on the rehearsal of the exam performance of his dancing school

An apartment for 3.30 forints. Petra Pelsőczy's film deals with LOTTO houses and their owners of the 1960s.

Hungarian animation film.

Short animated film

Mrs. Hanák is a hairdresser and a cleaner in a KTSZ. She knows how difficult it is to find a successor, so she constantly bullies the members of the cooperative. When she quits, the workers do everything they can to make her stay.

István Szabó reveals a lesser-known side to the public in this work, which strings together eight shorts of Budapest into a single movie. In the piece interpretable as a declaration of love addressed to the capital there are numerous motifs that are also to be found woven through the director’s major features, first and foremost Szerelmesfilm (Love Film), Tűzoltó utca 25. (25 Fireman’s Street) and Budapesti mesék (Budapest Tales). Besides allowing the viewer to marvel at the cityscape from 50 years ago in a series of fast-moving images, the film is still primarily about Szabó’s Budapest: his observations, his impressions, his imagination.

Three teams in junk yard rescues prepare and head out on the world's largest amateur road rally, the Budapest-Bamako. The daring adventure begins by rebuilding three iconic vehicles - a communist era Skoda, an Indian road legend - an Ambassador and a 40 year old Renault 20, all bound for a grueling 10,000 kilometer (6250 miles) road trip from Central Europe to West Africa. Will they make it to the finish line? Trans-Saharan and African off-road rally racing come alive in this adventure documentary with breathtaking desert backdrops and vibrant African cultures.

In a quiet bus stop, chance brings together a fan and their idol, the famous rapper Blaize. The conversation, which starts as a friendly chat about fame and success, slowly takes a dark turn.

The most problematic aspect of Zsolt Kézdi-Kovács's films is the political motif of The Right to Hope, which is incomprehensible from a child's point of view and therefore disrupts the unified soul. The film works just as well without it, and it really works without the element of logical incoherence it introduces into the story. All of this highlights a directorial virtue that was rare in this period. Zsolt Kézdi-Kovács is able to dramatise personal conflicts that arise purely from within.

For the young son of an ever-busy mother, a perfectly realistic pet is a wonderful companion, until the battery in the console dies.

The people around us can shape us, they can mould us like clay and make us who we are.

Dark, deserted streets in a devastated European town at the end of the 20th Century. People are on the run. Explosions. A woman and a man meet. And they lose sight of each other again after spending a night in a hotel room. Surrounded by a desolate and polluted universe where night never seems to end, these lonely souls are on their cynical quest for a lost world. But in the longed-for, world there cannot be any reality. In the other one, which is existing, life has ended. It needs to cross the wasteland and go beyond the horizon to find the starting point of something new.

A self-appointed bureaucrat stands in the way of our hero, to whom the spoiled little man cannot help but obey.