Balázs Béla Stúdió

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

In the final days of the American Civil War, an emigre Hungarian military officer attempts to map the situation of the enemy. Many veterans of the 1848 War of Independence in Hungary fought on the northern side. Experienced Fiala, Boldogh who struggles with homesickness and the reckless Vereczky all experience their enforced emigration in different ways and news of impending peace elicits different reactions from them all.

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

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

Short film about young poet József Attila.

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.

A grey-haired man walks through the fields. Fatigued, but with the same tenacity he roams the roads, the pathways, the tracks every day, medical bag in hand. Everyone awaits him: desperate or in hope, to the dying or to the woman in labour. He is the local GP. In fact, he is film director Imre Gyöngyössy’s father, the protagonist of one of his first short films. The personal narration based on the director’s poem is made complete by the pictures of Sándor Sára and István Gaál who were also active at Balázs Béla Studio at that time.

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.

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).

A man, a woman, an afternoon, a city, and an unspoken, hopeful desire to find love by way of the personal ads. A milestone of Hungarian cinema, Elek uses documentary techniques in a fiction context to make the frailty of everyday life as palpable as possible.

A twenty-year-old young man believes that sport and philosophical books help him to be strong enough to meet life, but his determination and will give way to depressing memories.

This film of three parts recalls memories from World War II. The titles of the parts are: Impartially, Terrified and Like a scream.

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

An agent, sent to solve the secret of the lives of those who have a daily routine, wishes to be a part of them. After revealing the secret - that the whole world is a projected image - he enters this dream-reality.

The twenty-minute film, divided into two parts, is made up of old newsreels and scenes recorded on the Budapest metro. The filmmaker places the celluloid tape, which is attached to the camera, on the trick table, examines the frames meticulously and cuts out individual details. The archival images are put into different contexts by different interventions.

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".

Lajos Mezei is an insignificant, average, middle-aged man. He works at the post office sorting letters using 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.

Shreds and fragments of film poetry that make its own place on the edge of a document film. The film is a college of dialogue between nature, abandoned country, and human fancy.