Discoveries from Hungary World Cinema

A man's struggle in the market

Young Hungarians are trying to make it in London.

In the vibrant metropolis of today's New York, two young Hungarian immigrants, Mirjam, journalist, and Attila, hand worker, make their ways, struggle with every day challenges.

Da Vinci's painting is animated.

A stop-motion animation.

After a devastating loss, a young man enters a forest with a camera, speaking into the void as his grip on reality begins to shift. Fragments of a fairy tale echo his path, while a figure known only as The Fool lingers nearby - unseen, uninvited, and slowly closing the distance.

Peter and his dog escape the summer heat by hiding in the refrigerator. They quickly empty it so that both of them can fit inside. With their imaginations running wild, they embark on a fantastic journey to the North Pole...

When summer suddenly turns into autumn, a blue Trabant joined by a magical Jack-o-Lantern embarks on a journey through the four seasons in a day, discovering friendship and colorful adventures.

The Inauguration of a Mechanical Bird in 2895, in New York City. The 4-minute burlesque motion picture with silent picture-style intertitles mocks the naively utopian world of the Victorian age. The film was inspired by the bitter satires of the elderly Jules Verne, in which a distorting mirror is held up to American civilization

Experimental short film.

Teó, a 38-year-old painter from Budapest, returns to her village for her mother’s funeral. There, she meets Misi, the former priest who lost an arm in an accident and was removed from his duties after a campaign led by Teó’s mother. Seeking revenge, Misi plans to use the people’s nightmares. Teó, struggling with artistic block, agrees with Misi to paint the church. Inspired by the Doom Paintings about the Last Judgment, she begins collecting villagers’ nightmares to paint the walls. Haunted by visions of her mother and her own fears, Teó wrestles with faith, art, and memory. She turns the church into her masterpiece — blending horror, healing, and reckoning, challenging Misi, and herself.

The film shows the transition period in Hungary during the early 90s. It starts with the mass redundancies in the Videoton factory in Székesfehérvár in 1989 and through the next several years follows the ups and downs of several of the sacked workers, their struggle to find new jobs and make a living during the economic crisis. Some of them are more successful than others.

Four people are sitting in a library, drinking wine and reading. Sometimes they talk a little.

Milla, a 24-year-old ballet dancer, is given the opportunity to audition abroad for a position she has a good chance of getting. Fearing how this might affect her relationship if she gets the job, she struggles to tell her boyfriend about the opportunity and to make the decision whether to go for it or not.

Based on a true story, a young boy’s near-death experience leads him on a surreal journey, bringing him face-to-face with life’s fragile and precious nature.

Oneirology is the science of studying human dreams, researching the biological, neurological, and evolutionary mechanisms behind the creation of dreams, rather than interpreting their meaning.

Early Curtiz feature

At the outskirts of a village in the Great Hungarian Plain, two communities live side-by-side as strangers: the workers of a high-tech factory and the inhabitants of the gypsy ghetto. This happens in spite of the fact that both of them deal with electricity. However, one community' s business needs constant supply of electric current while the other' s at least temporary power-cut.

A documentary about the history of the Janković family, a lineage of counts that came from central Bosnia and helped to modernize the Croatian region of Slavonia during the reign of empress Maria Theresia.

For seven years his family did not know anything about Gábor. One day he sends a video camera and a message on a video tape to his younger brother, János. They start sending video messages to each other and get on well, until it comes to light that Gábor and Judit, wife of János, had an affair in the past.

It is a parable about the contradiction between the "chronicle of wars", as a historical concept and the comprehensive approach of cultural history * for graduates and modern illiterates.

Andrew Feldmar has been both a practicing psychotherapist and a patient of psychotherapy for 54 years. The film invites the viewer to take a peek into certain sections of Feldmar's remarkable career, such as how it was influenced by his relationship with R.D. Laing, and how he ended up becoming the radical psychotherapist inspiring many. The film is a compilation of two talks held in 2023 in Hungary ("54 years' worth of experience - as a psychotherapist and a patient") and an exclusive conversation.

The documentary is a unique testimony to a dramatic era. It aims to shed light on a white spot of the 20th century: how Hungary sheltered the Bavarian royal family from fascism and enriched the almost 1,000 years of Bavarian-Hungarian historical relations. The Wittelsbach dynasty, which had dominated the political and cultural life of Bavaria for 800 years, confronted Hitler during the years of National Socialism. Part of the family fled to Italy and part to Hungary. The documentary shows the life of the members of the royal family in Hungary and their close ties to Hungarian culture.

A tiny bird restores the pianist's final hope by revealing the music hidden in everyday moments.

Between 1948 and 1956 a total of 400,000 criminal proceedings were launched against peasants, primarily people registered as kulaks. The documentary by András Sipos and Pál Závada examines in detail the story behind three cases of arson. In interviews made between 1987-1989, they were able to speak to the individuals concerned, to tell their story to the world and at least in this way to give them some symbolic restitution. Pál Závada has used the tragic interviews made at the time in his latest novel, Pernye és fű.

Two girls celebrate the slow flowing of life.

Conceived by the artist as a social research project in a housing complex in the suburbs of Budapest. During the course of May 2006, Erhardt rented a shopfront space on the ground floor of a high-rise building and started renovating it. The resulting film documents the artist experiencing the potential of his own interventions in a sensitive social setting. By including the proposals of neighbors and passersby for intermediate use of the space, Erhardt’s film is an attempt to shed new light on a community suffering from prejudices and imposed stereotypes, while the work analyses the construction of a social reality in post-communist Hungary through the portrayal of an “Advice Seeking Office”. At the same time Havanna also addresses issues of artistic failure and success, promise and lost opportunity…

Portrait film about László Cseh, star of the film Archaic Torso, twenty years later.

Two amateur criminals, Einstein and Shotgun, performs a burglary that goes terribly wrong. Continues into a three-person-hostage situation and media coverage.

Wolves by Marina Uzalec

Feri is forty-eight years old, twenty-six of which he has worked as a trainee in a screw factory. Workers' spirit, workers' choir, football matches. He's in good shape, though he's put on a little weight, he doesn't go bald, he's a big talker and considers himself a great ladies' man, even though he only used to go for Gizika, the storekeeper, in the factory days. His wife of twenty-six years is Joli, a year older than him. A perpetually dissatisfied woman with a headache. In her heyday, she was an administrator at KÖJÁL, but was demoted because of her diabetes. His hobbies include crocheting, crossword puzzles and long TV series, which he and his girlfriend, hairdresser Icu, regularly discuss. On that particular Saturday morning, when Feri was going fishing and Joli was about to cook stuffed chicken for their wedding anniversary, they had no idea that their lives would change so much that afternoon. This is where our story really begins.

The suicide of a small town mayor is investigated in the wake of sweeping political reforms.

Three young guys try to make the most of the summer, getting free accommodation from a night watchman in exchange for booze, and after work, they climb aboard a moored boat and swim until the evening. They talk a lot about their desires, their future, their dreams... The arrival of Rea, the girl on board, gives one of the boys a brief perspective, but as the ship sails on, the reality of everyday life becomes inevitable.

The poem-fable’s title character carved from wood, the eternally frozen, icy-hearted king, is afflicted by minus-degree cold, so he burns up all the wood of his country in the fireplace, until one day an innocent young girl raises her voice against the heartless actions of the king. This is the puppet film version of the poem-fairy tale by Ferenc Móra in which the young Ottó Foky debuted as the designer of puppet figures.

“This is the first of the cartoon films of Mr. Szegedi Szüts, the Hungarian artist whose work has been exhibited in London. The present film uses experiment in broken rhythms, and in abstract patterns of an individual character. Mr. Szüts is now working on cartoons in an English film studio.” - The [London] Film Society, 1933.

Our protagonist determines that from tomorrow, he is going to start a new life and concentrate on body building. However, somehow his big plans simply never come together. The little figure of this sardonic short is already every inch a forerunner of the title figure of the Gustavus (Gusztáv) series shown in cinemas in 1965, the iconic (anti)hero of Hungarian animation.

Filming of an exam film takes an unexpected turn.

The film is a tribute to etnographer Zsuzsanna Erdélyi ethnographer, who collected archaic folk prayers. Through animation, the prayers are brought to life.

The Horthy regime marching into the idyll of childhood with peculiar religious processions, Second World War air-raid sirens tearing adolescence to shreds, socialism propped on the shoulders of Stakhanovists in the shadow of Rákosi banners, and the experience of the ‘most cheerful barrack’ of goulash communism within strict confines: this is the collective fate of generation N.

A documentary about the exhumation of Imre Nagy and other '56 martyrs.