A mysterious death occurs in a retirement home for elderly actors. A neglected old actor, once famous for his Poirot-like roles, begins to investigate. He thoroughly interrogates the suspects, but has no easy task finding the killer among his fellow actors.
After his divorce, Bóna Péter, a beginner film director needs a bigger amount of money to settle his financial problems with his ex-wife. He travels to Pécs to see Sárika, an old veteran. He has not seen his aunt for a long time, and she receives him very friendly, but she flatly refuses to lend him any money.
The story happens in 1989 in the suburbs of Budapest, where the neighbor maintains an underground worker's guard training base, while the youngsters fall victim to a mistakenly posted letter.
In the box factory standing in the middle of nowhere only women work, and they themselves only waste their time, as the unmarketable boxes pile up in the yards. The fireman in duty, who stores stolen gasoline in the inflammable plant, sets up cameras in the women's locker room the sake of 'business'.
This story shows the two different parts of acting. The father is a strong, ambitious and inconsiderate actor but his son (Tibor) is a sensitive one. This all takes part somewhere in Hungary when socialism "controlled" the country.
In 1960s Hungary, an introverted teenager’s life is turned upside down by a few days in the company of his coat hanger salesman uncle: a roguish charmer with a zest for life and a weakness for horse racing and women.
Mr. Schneider became wealthy after the end of the communism, but still remained a simple man. Her wife although wants a lackey.
Based on a true story, this film is a dramatization of the events that led to the destruction of one of the most famous trains in history, the Orient Express.
Using verite conventions, a young couple with a baby and a child are worn away by the monotony of their lives.
The story of Bendegúz, the teenage boy who never succeeds in anything and about whom everybody's first though is "I wish you had been hanged when you were born!" drops out of school and becomes a cowboy. He works for the Stationmaster whose cows he has to graze by the railway. Despite his goodwill and kindheartedness he always manages to spoil everything he touches. No matter his wit, he gets into humiliating situations and regularly fights with the Ugly Witch (the Stationmaster's mother-in-law). However his good spirit and cheerfulness never leave him.
A Minister and the Secretary of the Opposition party go to a 5 star hotel to conduct a secret affair. Their plans are ruined when they discover a corpse lodged in the window of their room.
A priceless archaeological find, the “Mother of Barcika”, is loaded onto a special train to tour Hungary, only for fate to derail it at the sleepy Ivaros station. There, the engine, a gendarme, the relic and its guards all end up stranded in a pigsty, igniting chaos: the relic is gambled away, the station master loses control, and the local mayor’s daughter finds unexpected love. In the ensuing mayhem, rivalries, romances and small-town intrigues all collide until order is somehow restored.
A new socialistic city is being built on the Danube's riverbank in the early 50's. The story is about a teacher who's living there.
Stephen, living in a troubled family, breaks into a grocery store and wreaks vandalism. He is sent to a reform school. Later he works in a cleaning brigade and accidentally meets József Draskóczi, who denounced him. Draskóczi lives in an unloving, troubled atmosphere with his barren daughter and cynical son-in-law, ascetic about his youthful communist beliefs. He feels responsible for Istvan's fate, offering him a human voice and love. Despite his daughter's hysterical jealousy, he sends Istvan to school and then, through his previous connections, provides him with an apartment...
The Kondor family lives on the outskirts of Budapest, the father a truck driver abroad. The subtenant wants to act like the head of the family one day, but one of the children thwarts his wedding plans.
Young substitute teacher Rómeó Baradlay suddenly inherits homeroom duties for class 4C and struggles to keep order, only to develop feelings for one of his students.
The suburban school is totally bankrupt. When all hope collapses, Makkosi, a teacher resigned to the disappointing situation, and Annamari, a pretty French teacher, end up in a casino in Szentendre. They are surprised to discover that Makkosi can predict the winning numbers at roulette. The maths teacher is unimpressed and when her love seems to be on the wane, she puts all her eggs in one basket: to save her life, her love and her school. His mad plan is to multiply the school's meagre funds in the Monte Carlo casino.
The film is about a father’s heroic struggle and inner journey, over the course of which he realizes he cannot save his daughter from everything. When death finally appears at her side in the figure of a gallant groom, he comes to understand that resisting a greater power is futile. Our hero makes peace with his fate and with his loss.A father runs to the doctor when birth is happening earlier. All the elements are against him while he has fantasies about how hisdaughter will live as an adult. Early Wedding is a folk custom in Eastern Europe. When a young girl dies without a husband the family organize a wedding and they marry her to death.
"Colossal Sensation!" sees the history of Hungary in the 20th century through the eyes of twin circus clowns. For them, as for all Hungarians, it is a story of feast and famine, nostalgia and regret, suffering and triumph, although not all Hungarians had the misfortune (or was it the opportunity?) to destroy a wristwatch personally given to the Hungarian Party Leader by Stalin himself. - Roger Ebert
This grotesque, micro-realistic film is set in a small village at the end of the seventies. A TV-staff comes to the Petőfi Memorial House. They want to record the comic opera, The Postman of Longjumeau, by Charles Adam, a 19th century French composer.
Istvan Varju a.k.a. Kanya is a track driver. He drives alone on the roads and listens to the radio. We're In the middle of seventies, the radio broadcasts hungarian beat music. He is convinced that interesting and significant events in the life happen on the roads, so we should go, go and go in order not to miss something.
Upon his father's death, a Hungarian stage actor travels to Israel for the funeral and meets his stepmother for the first time.
This film is a psychological study of a woman who chooses solitude as an escape from the duplicity and emotional barrenness of the men around her.
The corpulent and ageing Ivicz, once an excellent baker, works as a deliverer now. He lives alone. At the weekends following the toilsome weekdays he is the boss. He regularly travels to the country, to work as the incorruptible referee of third class national soccer games.
Contemporary genre-painting of a Hungarian "middle class" family of four. The scene is the villa apartment almost finished, where the tourist guide mother, father who also works for the second economy and the lonely big girl preparing for her maturity examination turn up alternatively. It is only the teen-ager boy who really "lives" in this place: instead of attending school he stays home all day and observes the life of the surrounding by a self-made periscope. Internal communication of the family is accomplished in writing, on the pin-up board in the kitchen.
The general practitioner Balla and his wife abandoning her higher education begin their common life in the small mountain village in the hope of quick enrichment and return to the capital. Despite Éva and Emma, the two school mistresses longing for love and Demeter, the dove-keeper obsessed with a desire for flight life is boring in the country.
Mr. Dezső and Rezső are selecting the heroes for their new operetta. They represent different tastes and styles, and keep arguing about the casting of the four men and four women.
This satire on film depicts the micro-climate of a technical vocational school newly established at a housing estate. The construction vocational school holds a name-giving ceremony, thus calling the attention of its supervisory organ to itself. The school-master distributes as well as receives presents from the sponsoring factory, and the pupils sit for a written examination of unheard-of material. The results are devastating, which the despotic school-master attempts to conceal by a staged disciplinary procedure.
At the station of Almamellék the semaphore turns red unexpectedly and the conductor shows a stowaway - with no money nor ticket - off the train. The stowaway has to undergo a serious and long investigation that tries to uncover the reasons for his "deed". In the meantime he can watch, like a spectator in a movie-theatre, how Kerek József, the strutting stationmaster rules his ridiculous empire through office bureaucracy, indifference, servility and negligence.
While awaiting his release from the Soviet detention camp he is being held in, a half-starved refugee (Andras Ambrus) finds that an error has been made and his name is not on the to-be-released list. It is then that he is forced to assume the identity of a dead man whose name is on the list. Ambrus at first refuses, but because he was an orphan and cannot produce evidence of his true identity, he has no other choice. However, when he returns to the outer world and the community he was raised in, he is greeted with suspicion. When he tries to claim his part-ownership of a farm from his adopted uncle, he is refused and beaten by farmhands the uncle sets on him.
The heroines of this lyric comedy full of burlesque elements are two girls from a village who get totally engrossed in their day-dreaming. Ida and Rozi escape to the city to catch husbands for themselves.
Diplomafilm is a short film that Béla Tarr made to graduate from Art School, in 1981. It is the predecessor of The Prefab People, with the same plot and the same actors, but with some changes in the plot.
János is present at one of Tamás's concerts in the country. After the concert, he takes Tamás's son home in his car, while the couple worry about their son's whereabouts. Later they meet again. Once they played together and were good friends, but János left the band and they had to find a new pianist. The new pianist, Zsuzsa, also meets János. The two of them go to see the amateur film made of the one-time band.
Réb went to the United States about 20 years ago and in the eighties he returns to Budapest with his teenager daughter...
In the late 17th century, Hungary moved from Turkish to Austrian domination, becoming a key part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In this story, which takes place shortly after that time, three outlaws murder a group of people on their way to a wedding. One young man was a slave travelling with the group to entertain them with his skills as a trumpeter. The outlaws spare him for the same reason. He allows himself to believe that they are really an unattached group of independence-fighters, but after seeing their brutal and callous ways, he cannot believe that they are good men, and he turns them in to the authorities. At that point, he is unnerved to discover how nobly they bear the rigors of captivity. ~
In the small village of Rátót, every male is called Béla. When a woman gives birth to her child, she names him Józsi...
Two arts students, András and Viktor who are writing their thesis on detective stories, make up a story and keep nagging the famous film-director, who just came back from Hollywood, until he undertakes the job. At night they work on the film, in which two youths kill a director returning from the US. In the morning the director is found dead - a knife in his back.
This film describes the narrator's childhood, the years before and after the Hungarian Soviet Republic, in a burlesque and fabulous style and with the humour of a child's fantasy.
Adaptation of Adalbert Stifter's novella. In the middle of the 19th century, a young painter sets off to visit his friend - Major István Murai - in Hungary. A completely new life opens up to him. He is mesmerized by the beauty of nature, takes his time on his journey and only reaches his destination after detours and with help...
The film, set in 1956, stars Gyula Káli, a young man from the countryside who moves to Budapest and sees only one opportunity for success: to become a ping-pong champion. His work and his private life are determined by a strict training schedule, which he refuses to interrupt even for the days of October. It is only as a champion in 1957 that he wonders: will his achievements make up for the sacrifices he has made to achieve his goal?
Ambrus, the canon pretender and Gerzson, the stinking rich lawyer, taking advantage of a sect and a fake hospice, are engaged in doing unsuspecting old people out of their money.
A tale about a little fox Vuk from the novel of the famous Hungarian writer István Fekete.
The subway driver Szabó János is tired of conflicts, that so many other people across the town share the same name, so he decides to kill all of them, that he will be the only one left.
In the 19th century Austro-Hungarian Empire, David Hersko, a Jewish shepherd, witnesses the attack of a young girl. His home is burned down and he finds shelter with the family of a Jewish logger. The loggers find the body of a young woman which they bury, going against local laws. They are charged with her murder and it is believed that they killed her as a ritual murder.
One day, Dorka, one of the main characters in the fairy tale, goes to the market with her aunt. They buy a big chicken for the soup. The aunt sees a long-coveted white feather duster, but the vendor refuses to sell it, so the feisty aunt snatches it out of his hand and shoves it away. The spell that has kept the market peaceful is broken, and the ancient war between kofas, butchers and fishermen rages once more. Neither Minorka Vidor, a doctor of philosophy disguised as a hen, nor Emilia, a neurotic fairy godmother, can restore order until Auntie waves her feather broom again.
Hungary, 1950s. Istvánka is a sensitive little boy, longing for a role model and friendship, whose father died in the war before he was born. Before school starts, his mother takes him from the countryside to the capital. One day, he meets Lacy Márity, a 21-year-old big boy from Budakeszi, who from then on not only goes to play football with him, but also answers his most secret questions. He becomes his friend. Istvánka then becomes more tolerant of the local children's digs and the often incomprehensible behaviour of the adults. But the 1956 revolution intervenes. Laci Márity takes the lead in the rebellion.
To celebrate Sleeping Beauty's awakening, the cruel stepmother organises a dress-ball in the Wonder Castle and invites the characters of all tales and their two fathers, the Grimm-brothers. The stepmother announces total peace, but in fact she is preparing for a coup d'état with a phoney prince, a phoney Sleeping Beauty, through intrigue and violence in order to change the tales.
"Deserter's Gold", the sequel to the very popular "The Deserters", is a rich war comedy, skipping humorously around the more serious dangers of a war. Deserters Gold takes place during World War II, while the first film happened during WWI. The heroes' mission is to rob a Nazi-run bank in Poland for gold that will buy military supplies for the Polish Underground.
The TV film based on the novel by Boris Palotai is the story of a teenage girl's coming of age.
Set in 1918, this World War I drama follows a group of Austro-Hungarian soldiers—Czechs, Jews, Italians, and others—confined in a provincial barracks under German officers. Subjected to the cruelty of a sadistic lieutenant, they rebel, humiliate him, and later attempt escape. Disguised as guards for veterinary surgeons in Budapest, the deserters are eventually recaptured and returned for court-martial, forced once more to face their tormentor.
After witnessing a murder, a hapless pair of misfits escape their own near death experience by posing as male strippers - only to find themselves neck deep in even bigger trouble.