Good Kids

Ten-year-old Palkó has just moved home to Budapest from Berlin and observes the daily life of an ordinary Hungarian elementary school with confused amazement. Juci, the young teacher just started working there. She is the only one who understands Palkó, as in their own way, they are both suffering from the same, sometimes grotesque educational system.

Jef is stranded in Budapest and so spends a day reckoning with past and present lovers, as well as an estranged family, in this gorgeous low-fi indie drama.

On a film shoot inside the decaying Hotel Orion, an actress escapes her manipulative director by slipping into a false identity: she pretends to be the bar pianist’s long-lost lover. Drawn into the desires and loneliness of the hotel’s nighttime world, she feels the presence of this invented woman growing more real than the self she left behind. Shot at the time of artistic unrest in Hungary, the film lets real events seep into the fiction until it becomes a fever-dream documentary.

In an average Hungarian family home, a straight-A-student, yearning to be free, starts turning into a bear.