Budapest Tales

A Hungarian Secret Service official attempts to defect the country and earn political asylum in the West.

The movie deals with the championship-winning German soccer team of 1954. Its story is linked with two others: The family of a young boy is split due to the events in World War II, and the father returns from Russia after eleven years. The second story is about a reporter and his wife reporting from the tournament.

An adaptation of a well-known novel by Hungarian writer Lajos Zilahy.

Two employees at a gift shop can barely stand one another, without realising that they are falling in love through the post as each other's anonymous pen pal.

Budapest in the thirties. The restaurant owner Laszlo hires the pianist András to play in his restaurant. Both men fall in love with the beautiful waitress Ilona who inspires András to his only composition. His song of Gloomy Sunday is, at first, loved and then feared, for its melancholic melody triggers off a chain of suicides. The fragile balance of the erotic ménage à trois is sent off kilter when the German Hans goes and falls in love with Ilona as well.

Entering a seamy underground world of peep shows, nude clubs, and live Internet sex is David Huxley, an aspiring politician who has everything to lose. Secretly filmed in a steamy three-way with his fiancée Tish and a gorgeous young model, David is desperate to find the extortionist who's demanding an exorbitant amount of money for the negatives. But when the blackmail trail ends in murder and David is kidnapped, Tish must come up with $5 million ransom or her fiancé's once-promising career, and life, may come to a dead end.

A tale about a strange young man, Bulcsú, and the fellow ticket inspectors on his team who work aboard the subterranean Budapest Metro. A tale about racing along the tracks, and about a mysterious serial killer. And a tale about love.

In the bleak days of the Cold War, espionage veteran George Smiley is forced from semi-retirement to uncover a Soviet mole within his former colleagues at the heart of MI6.

An Hungarian youth comes of age at Buchenwald during World War II. György Köves is 14, the son of a merchant who's sent to a forced labor camp. After his father's departure, György gets a job at a brickyard; his bus is stopped and its Jewish occupants sent to camps. There, György find camaraderie, suffering, cruelty, illness, and death. He hears advice on preserving one's dignity and self-esteem. He discovers hatred. If he does survive and returns to Budapest, what will he find? What is natural; what is it to be a Jew? Sepia, black and white, and color alternate to shade the mood.

Janos and Kata are thrown together during the Second World War and forced to pose as husband and wife to hide from the Nazis. The intensity and suffocating intimacy of their new relationship and the circumstances in which they find themselves, forces them to confront past prejudices and assumptions and challenge what they truly believe.

A Hungarian family forced to flee the Communist country for the United States must leave a young daughter behind. Six years later, the family arranges to bring the absent daughter to the United States where she has trouble adjusting. The daughter then decides to travel to Budapest to discover her identity.

Like the twining vines of the honeysuckle, each of the three stories in this film follow a character whose growth is impeded by the clouds of society hanging over their heads. From a Hungarian taxi driver torn between the preservation of his family and the unexpected humane responsibility found in the clandestine activities he does for profit, to the Hungarian teenager of a single mother whose idea of life goals and success seems perpetually defined by the missing figure of a role model, and finally to the young Indian Carnatic singer who amidst personal and national turmoil decides to sacrifice the one thing that defines her - her talent, Honeysuckle aims not to narrate or condescendingly offer a message, as much as it seeks to illustrate the many life directions available, and the way none of them are good, in a world severely lacking a moral center.