Discoveries from Hungary World Cinema

Once upon a time back during the high noon of the cheerful gray Kádár regime, there was a teenage girl living in Nagykovácsi who jumped from the third floor because of unrequited love and loneliness, but miraculously lived to bear three children, try her luck with five different husbands, to bury her teenage son, to stifle her grief in drink, to help people more unfortunate than herself, to show the viewers what a truly passionate life is like by participating in a documentary film.

Eszter, trapped in toxic love relationships, participates in a new type of therapy program as her last chance to break out, where she has to sort out her relationship with her father in a virtual reality built from memories.

The film follows Adam, a freelance artist. He is deeply connected to the '90s performance scene. Set in Budapest's alternative art world, the story explores Adam's struggles as his mother battles cancer. The mood of the film echoes the 1990s Hungarian film No Girl Ever Had This Effect on Me. It captures a similar raw, alternative atmosphere, blending Budapest's underground art scene with personal struggles, existential uncertainty, and a melancholic yet deeply human perspective.

A man taked his mother to lake Balaton, where she always wanted to go, and remembers his childhood in post war Budapest.

Zsiga wakes up to a missed call from his best friend’s father, fearing bad news. Wandering across Budapest, he encounters various people until fate leads him to an unfamiliar boy who helps him confront the truth about his best friend.

Dombóvári István is back with a new stand up show, where he is talking about anything, without the fear of the system or censor.

A wacky fantastic journey that presents the amazing inner world of the human body through symbols and subconscious associations evoking themes of growing up, inner authority and transformation.The play of creating art parallels with the symbolic play of human cells within the body, while reflecting the larger rhythm of life in the world around them inviting you to lose yourself in a colorful kaleidoscope of life.

Ali is a Hungarian film director (over 50, grey hair, not completely bald yet), who is no longer making films. The question is: what has happened to him? One day, he gets a phone call from Hong Kong, and decides to find an answer to the question in Mong Kok on the 37th floor.

The documentary shows the lives of the victims deported to the forced labour camps in Hortobágy between 1950-53, up to the present day. We seek answers to the questions of how the victims coped with what happened to them, how they shared these events with their descendants, and how the tragedy suffered by their parents and grandparents affects their descendants today.

Documentary film about the largest decentralized monument and art project in the world, and its personal core

Arriving for the school celebration, parents go to extreme lengths to iron out all the wrinkles from their boisterous children. They find they are helped in this by the rigidly strict dance teacher. The domineering commands of the lumbering teacher who cannot bear clatter of any sort and the hammering bars of the piano deconstruct the children and uniformize them in accordance with the ideal of adults: first they turn into oafish garden gnomes, then motionless mushrooms, graceful swans, and finally bounding deer.

Satire on couples featuring Romeo and Juliet. The classic romantic couple can only squabble with each other until mischievous Cupid's arrow finds its mark...

A woman outgrows her old patterns in body and soul, finding her identity. She is an inspiring role model for a growing generation of women who follow her example.

Listening to the morning radio show, someone is getting ready, assembling their human body, and then stepping out the door, trying to blend in with their peers in a "natural" way.

Emi wants to talk to Ádám, but the turmoil of the party is pushing them further apart. Their friends seem to be having a good time, but they all have personal stories of unfulfilled love. At daybreak, Emi summons all her courage and tries to tell Ádám how she feels.

The notorious killer of the Hungarian Great Plain, Pipás, is wanted by women who are abused by their husbands to make them disappear. As he becomes more experienced at his job, he is haunted by his victims and his own memories of being a victim of abuse himself. From when he started his life as a woman, until he became a man and an assassin.

Adaptation of Péter Hajnóczy’s short story, The Ant and the Cicada.

Animated short.

At the beginning of 2020, twelve youths from Hungary receive the opportunity to continue their studies abroad in a special international circus performer class. The children, aged 12-14 would give anything to achieve their dreams. They are ready to leave their friends and families behind to start a new life far from home, but an unexpected event, the global COVID-19 pandemic paralyses the world, thus seems to prevent the voyage. The pupils finally are set to spend a semester at the Kyiv Academy of Circus Arts in the Fall of 2021, thereby they get a small glimpse of life there before it is shattered by war a few months later. The members of the class embark on their journey as children, but the challenges they encounter along the way force them to find their inner selves, forge bonds and return home as grown-ups. Circus Siblings teaches us to hold onto our dreams even if our world is flipped upside down, and that the road to our goals may be more important than the destination itself.

During the large-scale performance, which was postponed twice due to the epidemic, 28 songs were performed, from the oldest Bonanza songs to the songs of the latest middle album entitled AZ UTOLSÓ BÉKEÉV. The event is immortalized by an impressive concert film on DVD: the publication contains all the songs of the performance with three sound standards (stereo, DD 5.1 and DTS) and subtitles, and the DVD also includes an exciting feature film about the preparations, in which the band and members of the technical team will also speak.

In the animated short we can see three protagonists who, even though live in separate subjective worlds, they all need the same yellow flower for their happiness. The fat man stranded in a fragmented, surreal world wants to rebuild his house made of honey. The elderly man stuck in an old-timer sci-fi movie feels nostalgic about the environment prior to the devastating robots. The kid living in his playful fantasy world would like to replace his mom’s broken plant.

József works at the largest still-operational grain silo in Budapest. He’s been doing this work for more than 30 years, and lives in a container home next to the structure, where trucks and trains rumble past his window. When he is lowered into the ten-story-deep silos to clean them, he looks like a scuba diver at work. These scenes are captured with stunning, contrast-rich camerawork, and ably edited with a strong sound design.

"This evening I will air out my most treasured possessions, and the ironing will be hammered down along with the laundry. I'm cutting out themes from my life that I've been afraid to talk about frankly at the dinner table, but that the stage can't get away with. The audience gets a glimpse of the joys, the struggles, the blankets that cover the covers of a family starting out in a 9th floor council flat in the city of Leningrad. Come and be part of this entertaining educational therapy!"

Józsi, a sailor who once traveled the world, dock worker and stable boy lives in the small village of Nyírmadocsa. From here he sets out to find a road roller for his small village, so that at last there will be a real road in the village. When Józsi, far from his beloved homeland, gets the engine, he sets off on an adventurous journey, roaring through Hungary towards his small reseda smelling village.

Lilla (@lillak__) and Gergo (@raczgerike2013) are wandering in each other DMs when they finally find intimacy.

Three young people talk about their wildest erotic dreams. This illustrated, documentary-styled dialogue presents a vivid, kinky fantasy world. "Beddreams" celebrates sexual freedom in the language of animation.

Peti is a diabetic and breeder of phoenixes. When a sweet meteorite lands in his room one day, he can’t wait to rush out and tell someone about it. Irma, dressed in her dad’s old diving suit and the architect of the home-made meteorites, proves to be an ideal companion…

A Hungarian oral storyteller, and a Lebanese filmmaker—arriving in Budapest from a different era. Each bringing their own stories and entrusting their words to one another rather rhythmically, they weave a layered visual story.

Szani, Tina and Emese: or as they call themselves, the Divas are three twenty-year-old girls who can talk for hours about makeup, clothes, or profile pictures. Máté, a young director, enters the scene, following them with his camera until their graduation, to find out what is hidden behind their perfect makeup. Meanwhile they learn from each other, they all make a step towards adulthood.

There’s only one matchstick left in the box. This matchstick, this ordinary thing is the protagonist of Mitch-Match series. The main character is a blue headed matchstick, that embarks on a journey in every episode and always returns to the box at the end of lots of strange, playful and imaginative adventures. A single matchstick, an easy-to-use object and at the same time opportunity for creative experiences that evoke everyone’s fantasy world.

The life of a group of friends has been shaken by a tragic event. They travel to the countryside together to try and face the situation.

Feri, a young director general in Sopron, and Ilona, his secretary, are in love with each other. Feri's mother, however, has a different woman in mind for her son to marry. The girl, disappointed, is off to Pest.

A man goes on a quest to find the spirit of a woman to whom he could never say goodbye.

The Hungarian village of Medgyesbodzás is slowly sinking, and the inhabitants are baffled. Their houses are all propped up, and they point out the cracks and holes for us. The village receives very little help from national authorities, so they turn to the European Union. The middle-aged Jószef does his best to learn English, so when they file a request for EU assistance, he can submit a short film in which he and the other villagers tell their story.

A landowner Gáthy and his wife adopt an orphaned infant at the birth of their own son, only to realize too late that they can’t tell which baby is which. They raise both boys as their own until, on the brink of the sons’ marriages, questions of lineage brought up by prospective mothers and meddling mothers-in-law threaten to unravel their family.

An ironic insight into the cultural politics of Hungary's Kádár-era.

Six physical workers, once working for Videoton, decide to come together and create a company on their own.