Discoveries from Hungary World Cinema

A zonked-out student director and his responsive D.O.P. friend are hunting for location to their new black and white movie in the great Hungarian desert. Strictly fiction?

“Cargo couriers wake up every day at 4:30. They don’t ask any questions. They receive the package and deliver it.”

The unjust and humiliating details of the Treaty of Trianon are still unclear to us. Let's face it, as a result of decades of deliberate silence, today's generations know very little about it. In the negotiations that preceded the signing of the treaty, the Hungarian government did everything it could to achieve a more just peace. A team of Hungarian scholars led by Count Pál Teleki prepared the Carte Rouge, a red map faithfully depicting the ethnic relations of the Carpathian Basin, while Count Albert Apponyi, the head of the Hungarian peace delegation, was given the opportunity to present Hungarian ideas to the leaders of the victorious powers at the French Foreign Ministry in Paris on 16 January 1920.

Tibor has been in love with Alíz since she first took his clothes to the dry cleaners. It was Tuesday, raining. Her wet hair stuck to her forehead. He would rather never wash her clothes again, because they smell like lilacs. Melodrama in three pictures.

Tarics lives almost as a hermit in his own forest, with only his landlady by his side. A mining engineer and his beautiful wife arrive there. The engineer wants to buy the forest for his clients, but Tarics is adamant, even though the mine in the forest would bring great benefits. Rachel, the engineer's wife, can't stand the forest man's stubbornness and decides to reach out and make Tarics fall in love, so that she can humiliate him and blackmail him in order to sell the forest. Florea watches in despair as his master falls more and more into the net of the beautiful woman. However, the tense, exciting game turns into a tragedy... as the woman really falls in love with her victim - and vice versa.

The film sums up the results of a massive endeavour in historical restoration and reconstruction, then recording Elek became engaged with: that of the Chasidic songs Hungarian/Romanian composer Max/Miksa/Mihai Eisikovits wrote down in 1938-39 – purely phonetically, without knowing either Yiddish or Hebrew or Aramaic.

Ali belongs to the Yazidi religious community, a persecuted minority in Iraq. With Ali’s life in danger, he escapes to Hungary, where he finds a home, but doesn't lose the feeling that he's an outsider. He decides to make a change and learns to read and write in Hungarian in order to take the citizenship exam. While Ali's loneliness is compounded by his strict religion, he believes he can become accepted like any other Hungarian citizen.

"But my class in Töhötöm Street could wait until I had finished my explanation even after ringing the bell! I bet my students on Töhötöm Street didn't confuse the corridor with the football field! Thank God for the "Töhötöm"... Aunt Joli, the young class teacher, often starts her speeches to the 6th grade class this way. She once says: "But the people of Töhötöm Street love music!" The 6.b's self-esteem can't take it any more, and they invite those "famous Dumpling Street kids" to a competition.

An average Hungarian family are driving home on the motorway from their seaside holidays when they are forced to stop at a parking lot to tighten loosened luggage. Getting out of the car, they hear the sounds of Arabic singing coming from the van parking next to their car, in the cargo area of which a mother is calming her crying child. The family experience the horrors of refugees’ lives for a few moments when the smugglers who are guarding the truck attack them. Finally, they escape unharmed, but they are unable to carry on with their lives as before.

In the tragic autumn of 1944, the possibility of liberation from the war and the chains of the German alliance flashes before our eyes. Lacking leadership, in the first few hours people cannot yet know that their hopes are dashed, and they prepare the country not for celebration, but for burial. Some of the soldiers defect to the advancing Soviet forces, while others reload their weapons. A small group chooses a third path: they flee the front and try to fight their way home through adventurous journeys and encounters.

A dearly departed VHS rental chain gets a bittersweet send-off in this documentary featuring testimonials from employees and film lovers.

During a film course lead by Yvette Biro at the Hungarian Academy of Drama and film in 1995, the director students were shown a black-and-white photo taken by Lucien Herve in 1952, and they were given the task of writing a short film based on it. Three women are standing at the outskirts of a village, looking out of the picture in the same direction. This six-minute one-shot film shows what the Herve photo does not.

The tender-ironic film outlines some well-known situations of the dog-owner relationship.

When the spring that sustains the ecosystem dries up, its cry for help triggers a process that uses all of the world's resources to build a tower.

Juli and Réka are about to have a baby together. They are waiting for Juli's mother for dinner so they can tell her the news. This is not gonna be easy as Mari doesn't think her daughter has what it takes to raise a kid with two moms.

András spent his whole life trying to build a stable home for his son, but when he stumbles upon Kristóf's deepest secret, their relationship is tested. Can they connect with each other for the first time in their life now, when they only have a few months left?

An animation advertisement for the airline Air India which went on to screen as a movie at film festivals.

An experimental vision of a lake in Heves County where rose hips, water and sunlight merge with still time. Fierce Angel evokes the flapping of birds' wings, the breathing of reeds, flashes of light and flickering shadows shape the subconscious face of nature.

The powerful, all-powerful lord, Bishop Ambrus, keeps the unfortunate serfs of his county kingdom in fear. But one day, a young man - the youngest son of the poorest serf - stands up to him. The people of the area call him Star-Eyed.

A Balkan folktale about a girl who disguises herself as a man and defies the world. On her journey, she overcomes magical creatures and her own fears – until she meets a legendary beast that changes her forever.

The film tells the story of a year in the life of a small town in Eastern Hungary, Tiszavasvár, in the period leading up to the 2024 local elections. Through the personal stories of five characters, it connects the changes that have taken place since the privatisation of the Alkaloida chemical factory, once the pride of the town, in the 1990s, with the current state of affairs in Hungary.

Karesz's mother, a weaver who was widowed at an early age, is determined to raise her son to be a civil servant, but Karesz refuses to live up to expectations. First he drops out of high school, then of office work. He also becomes disillusioned with the masked world, and love does not complete his life. Slowly, he gets lost in the complexities of growing up...

Peti Janklovics comes in, tells stories, stands up. In the 4th minute he mentions, weaving into the story, how much he loved Smooth Criminals by Michael Jackson, whereupon Edu suddenly bursts in, the song plays, bone pro, choreographed dance, music, lights. It's mostly about the pulse, the mood, the moves, but more about having a laugh, then Peti goes out, Edu continues, and the audience already suspects that at any moment Peti or Edu again could burst back on stage, be it Lambada clip analysis, glassing, wardrobe riots, lemon Calippo, gel hair, sunglasses, plaid flanneling tied around the waist (nirvana era), Hally-Gally, bumper cars, bike shorts (women's), glassing underneath Route 67, New Kids And The Block fan club on the cherry tree, denim jacket, three-second phone calls, Hyper-Hyper, or, for example, a feature on professional slowpokes, and a detailed recounting of the first school disco kisses with audience participation, but not like that.

Underrated in light of its current (February 4, 2007) IMDb score of 6.4, this film reminded me of what Joseph Heller's 'Something Happened' could look like if a film was to be made out of it. Our middle-aged character's life is in a fragile balance at the start and soon that balance will, of course, be disturbed. Even without much in the way of drama at first, an at times nightmarish reality intermingles with nightmares, and, typically for a movie from this region, state bureaucracy and the absurdities of a semi-legal order play a role in moving developments along. So what is it that awaits our hero down the informal road he is officially sent? Complete deconstruction? Or the 'unbearable lightness of being'? If you give the movie the time to unfold, it will reward you revealing an entertaining concept by the end.

In 1911, natural gas is discovered in Transylvania, and György Bernády, the ambitious mayor of Marosvásárhely, dreams big: a domestic innovation modeled on the Western model. His enthusiasm takes him all the way to America. But is the Hungarian terrain ready for any kind of innovation?

In a world where, after each break-up, ex-partners must exchange a chosen body part, Wish You Were Ear explores the lasting impact of relationships. People not only lose a literal piece of themselves with each split, but also carry visible reminders of every past love.

Hungarian Thriller Film

A short dynamic animation about a man struggling not to drown.

In this unique documentary, Tough Girls, we can follow the lives of 7 to 36-year-old female boxers. They are on a roller coaster swinging between emotions and brutal physical fight when the question appears why they pursue such manly sports? Is all the pain, injuries, and shame worth it? The answer is more complex than one would think.

A sensual and insightful film about three elderly dancers from Budapest. Irén, Éva and Ágnes - all between 90 and 100 years old - were once part of the early modern dance movement in Hungary. Taking the role of a dance student and dialogue partner Boglárka retraces how each of the elderly dancers transformed their lives and movement practices in order to survive the major socio-political changes of the last century. The film takes us into a personal and bodily encounter with three very different personalities and their relation to their past and present. Returning to the stage and performing in their private rooms, Irén, Éva and Ágnes reveal us an incredible richness of experience stored in their bodies. A choreography of memories.

Games of “socialist” Monopoly were played in the Soviet Union: for the Hungarian version, called “Manage your money wisely”, the first to furnish an apartment would win the game. Four players meet before Thiago Carvalhaes’s camera to throw the dice once again, reliving, through interspersed archives, their memory of communist Budapest and what it has become under Orban.

Twenty years ago, one of the most influential bands in post-millennium Hungarian pop music, Bëlga, burst onto the scene. But the band members, who hide behind sunglasses and costumes, have always kept themselves hidden from the public eye, and so far no comprehensive documentary has been made about them, and they are rarely interviewed. Gergely Laki and Bálint Klopfstein-László's film Bëlga - Ancestral History focuses on the birth and early days of the band. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr62wO8A0ws)

Ladányi, a landowner of 800 acres lives high in Ádámháza, while his bailiff, Pókai keeps on raiding him.

A day in a life of a woman who is busy taking care of her obese dog. Her lovely show of affection towards the animal is interrupted by the arrival of her partner, who, in need of the attention of the woman, affects the cosy atmospere of the house.

Ernő, under a pseudonym, takes up a position as a music teacher at a girls' school under the patronage of his grandmother, Countess Szerémy, to meet one of the pretty students, Martha, who later turns out to be the child of her grandmother's disowned son. The Countess agrees to the young couple's marriage, but Márta falls in love with Colonel Örkényi's nephew Kálmán. In the meantime, Ernő's feelings change, and he meets Kálmán's sister Piroska, whom he would prefer to marry. The Colonel, whose planned marriage to Countess Serémy was prevented by her mother when he was young, refuses to hear of it.

The first civil guardsman rises to the task of apprehending a dangerous serial killer before his city descends into chaos. Set ten years before the events of 'The Siege'.

A nervous painter-to-be has to overcome his own demons during the university entrance exam, which appear as pests in his imagined inner garden.

The Great Reaper pays a visit to an old lady, but she is too busy to deal with her visitor.