Balázs Béla Stúdió

A family slowly disintegrates under various pressures in late 1970s communist Hungary.

Using verite conventions, a young couple with a baby and a child are worn away by the monotony of their lives.

Huszárik's graduation film was another short entitled Groteszk (Grotesque) in 1963 about a strange train voyage of an artist carrying his own picture.

The film depicts the lives of veterans of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution in the American Civil War, based in part on an Ambrose Bierce story. The whole film was re-edited using his own method called "light editing" in order to make it resemble a damaged silent film from the late 1800s.

A film study in which the symbol of flight which contradicts human limitations inspires an emotional rhythm of scenes varying along three lines: the human desire for the sky (the first attempts for flight), the death of birds (experiments on animals) and the death of a human being in heights (a fall which isn´t a flight).

Often called a “film poem” or a “film symphonie” Huszárik’s masterpiece consists of montages of horses from the dawn of time to the modern times from cave paintings to horse races. (MUBI)

A playful portrait of a young woman who merrily roams the streets of Budapest. A New Wave love letter in motion.

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.

Lajos Mezei is a middle-aged, insignificant, average man. He works at the post office sorting letters with a machine. His life is but a series monotonous everyday events, but he has a passion that makes him different from his fellow humans. This passion replaces all human relationships and events in his life. He flees into a world of his own, hermetically sealed, which only he can understand and where he therefore feels safe. One day, however, his well-balanced life is turned upside down.

Ostensibly a non-narrative study of various aspects of a rural winter, this short film by one of modern Hungarian cinema’s greatest visual poets has all the spellbinding qualities of his better-known feature debut Sindbad (Szindbád, 1971), but here allied to a winning sense of humour that’s never quite allowed to detract from the haunting beauty of many of the images. The end of autumn is heralded by a few red leaves still clinging to a statue’s sculpted robes, while whip pans across the increasingly wintry landscape and close-ups of rippling water are given character by seemingly random freeze-frames and Zoltán Jeney’s electronic chirrups on the soundtrack. There are recurring shots of birds, migrating en masse, huddled by the icy water or lying individually dead, frozen stiff in the snow. So far Capriccio has been a reasonably generic mood piece, but then the snowmen arrive…

Following Antal Végh's sociography the members of amateur film studio Cinema 64 recorded a 90 min 8mm film in the village of Penészlek in 1968. During a return to the village eight years later they have the chance to compare the changes from past to present in the lives of the local residents.

A Hungarian jew is forced to give a false testimony on his relatives in WW2 Hungary.

According to Peter Brook, all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged is for a man to walk across an empty space whilst someone else is watching him. Thus, an empty space becomes a bare stage. However, this raises countless questions about the relationship between reality, everyday presence and role-playing, something experimental filmmakers coming from the 1970s world of theatre dealt with in detail. Tibor Hajas explored the topic in a short experimental film made at BBS.

A man becomes acquainted with the mystery of female hands during a trip.

Documentary about the Italian men that visit Hungary to meet girls and the Hungarian women that fall in love with them.

Eighteen years after the failure of the revolution and freedom fighting 1848-49, the politicians of Hungary preparing for a compromise with Austria try to make use of the symbol of the revolution, the figure of the poet Petőfi Sándor, to their own advantage. They visit all the memorial sites, find the witnesses and recall the famous events. Memories and political intentions conflict with each other, and the circumstances of the poet's death cannot be reconstructed entirely.

The footage was shot in the writer's room a few days after his death. Everything in the room was untouched. The poet György Petri reads from one of Péter Hajnóczy's works, Miss Embolia. A sacred image of the Eastern European "beaten generation."

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.