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.
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.
Story of a young teacher starting to work in rural Hungary
The beginning shows Hungary devastated by the war and the postwar reconstruction with its communist government. Our hero (played first by Dániel Erdély and later, as a young man, by András Bálint) is clearly determined to find out what he can about his father who died young. All he knows is that he was a doctor and perhaps he was an honored victim of fascism. He never really finds out but his relationship with his mother, his friends and his Jewish girlfriend will make him totally independent of this need to find all about Apa or Father.
1939: Rome stands on the brink of World War II. In the midst of this political and social tension famed producer Davide Rieta is making a major film. The two lead actors, the German woman Kristina Baumgarten and the English man James Clavel ace each others' initial antagonism and eventually fall in love. Meanwhile the fascist police are looking for an excuse to arrest the Jewish filmmaker and any other potential "troublemakers." The producer and his crew decide to make one final extraordinary effort to complete the film - against all odds.
Grace is excited for the summer so she can start a business with her friends, but things take an unexpected turn when her mom announces a trip to Paris. There, Grace must learn to get along with her French cousin, Sylvie, and she finds unexpected inspiration for her business. Then, Grace finds out her grandparents bakery, that inspired her to start a business, is closing. Can she and her friends find a way to save it?
A remake of Vávra's 1948 atomic age thriller Krakatit. Engineer Prokop creates the devastating explosive “Krakatit” and soon confronts manipulative agents and imperialist conspiracies. Realizing his invention’s threat, he fights to prevent its misuse, risking everything to stop those who seek to exploit his epochal discovery.
A story of two young people in Hungary, Jancsi and Kata. First they are good friends, later lovers. Soon after the 1956 Revolution Kata leaves Hungary, Jancsi stays there. After 10 years Jancsi is allowed to visit Kata in France, their love is reborn, but after a short, very happy period Jancsi has to return to Hungary and their love fades as years have gone by.
Producer Carlo Degli Esposti envisioned a trilogy on Liberty, focused on three key moments in the second half of the twentieth century: the repression of Bucharest in 1956, the Prague Spring and the Berlin Wall. The first, and only time delivery of this trilogy, is THE TUNNEL OF FREEDOM. A tunnel that allowed 36 people to circumvent the strict and repressive surveillance of newly erected Berlin Wall.
"Budapest Tales" is about a group of people (consisting of Szabo regular Andras Balint along with Ildiko Bansagi and Karoly Kovacs) who find a broken down tram while trying to go to the city. The people band together and try to get the tram back on the train tracks and head towards the city. Along this journey the passengers encounter many people who join them on the tram. What started out as only a handful of people has now turned into a small village. As the people travel on to the city each person takes on certain roles and through the course of time these roles will change. Some people fall in love, others out of love, and a few even die. But life goes on. The people keep the tram going hoping to reach Budapest.
Swedish account of Raoul Wallenberg, the man responsible for the largest rescue of Jews during World War II.
Returning from his imprisonment in Russia during the First World War, Franz Ferdinand Trotta, a young KuK officer, discovers how much the defeat has transformed Vienna and his people. He is stunned by the new order of things. Having lost his entire fortune and his wife, who is having a sapphic relationship with a Hungarian artist, he tries to regain his place in a world that appears devastated.
Variations on relationships in a New Year Day atmosphere set in a huge and rundown 1980s style hotel awaiting demolition by Lake Balaton, Hungary. Three women and five men in various ways.
Jancsi is part of a closely knit gang of young engineers. They see the older engineers as mediocre, and have grand ideas about developing new inventions together. With changing living conditions the five friends start to grow apart. At a party Jancsi suddenly meets Éva Halk. They fall in love, and find common memories in the engagement in The Pioneer Railway at the age of 12.
This film is a documentaristic dispute about the possibilities of young people to assert themselves, to make a career. Zsuzsa is a third-year university student studying pedagogy. She has been dating Zoltán for three years, and her thinking has been fundamentally shaped by this relationship. Yet now she would like to break up with him.
Miklós Mészöly's short novel Film aims to show the last few hours of an elderly couple's life. The last moments of two people who, in the midst of historical storms, inhumanity and loss of values, remained together in the strange grip of love and dependence. The most moving is the formulation of the fundamental question: can we and can we say goodbye with dignity, how much we are lost and vulnerable when we set off into the unknown.
This lavishly spectacular film focuses on the character of Lőrinc Parcen Nagy from the 1200-page Tibor Déry novel interwoven with numerous autobiographical elements. Lőrinc Parcen Nagy is the offspring of an upper middle class family, whose life is marked by two violent deaths: the suicide of his father and the slaughter of an innocent worker. He breaks with his family and his mother in disgust; she is of weak character, a person who abandoned her own husband. He is also unable to discover the right tone with his colleagues and his lover who is an illegal party worker.
In post-WWII Hungary, a group of Communist college students arrive at a Catholic seminary hoping to engage in peaceful debate with its students.
José Costa is a Brazilian ghost writer. Returning from a ghost writers convention his airplane is rerouted to Budapest. His life is also rerouted when he meets Krista and with her help, learns "the only language in the world which, according to the tongue-wagers, the devil respects.
Three thirtysomething chemical scientists, Laci, Gyuri and Kati celebrate the success of their development program before New Year's Eve with drinking for several days. But the morning of New Year's Eve does not bring the expected recognition, because the nice, bald, old director is replaced by a young, bald, but disagreeable one. In a sodden atmosphere it becomes clear that everybody has an axe to grind in the informative discussions.
Set in the 1890s on the Hungarian plains, a group of farm workers go on strike in which they face harsh reprisals and the reality of revolt, oppression, morality and violence.
This film is about the relationship of a mother and her daughter, the split-up of their family, the blessing and curse of belonging together and about coming of age - all this from the perspective of the young girl Aglaja. The story is based on real-life events, an Eastern European circus artist family that fled to the West. If they want to stay in the circus business they have to make up an exotic act. The mother spends all their money to buy a very dangerous act: hanging by her hair high up in the dome of the circus while juggling with burning torches. Every night Aglaja is terrified by the fear of losing her mother. But, on some day, she has to follow the family tradition and become the "Woman with the Hair of Steel".
This grotesque historical film is a caricature of the narrow-minded and careerist oligarchs of the 20s. A young military officer stops the young jurist from killing himself and recommends him to his commander, lieutenant-colonel Doborján as a typist.
A young refugee, Aryan, is shot while illegally trying to cross the Hungarian border. While tending him back to health, a doctor at a refugee camp discovers that Aryan has gained an extraordinary talent—he can levitate. Aryan is smuggled out by the doctor, who is intent on exploiting his secret.
1952, Budapest. Kati is thirteen years old when her mother dies. Her father works as a founder at the Miskolc foundry, deprived of his former position of director-engineer. Kati is left alone in their flat, transformed into a place crowded with tenants. That is, not quite: in her imagination her mother is alive again, for she still needs her.
Based on the true story of a Russian serial killer who, over many years, claimed victim to over 50 people. His victims were mostly under the age of 17. In what was then a communists state, the police investigations were hampered by bureaucracy, incompetence and those in power. The story is told from the viewpoint of the detective in charge of the case.
Set during the fading glory of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the film tells of the rise and fall of Alfred Redl, an ambitious young officer who proceeds up the ladder to become head of the Secret Police only to become ensnared in political deception.
The life and career of the brutal Soviet dictator, Josef Stalin. Through the eyes and memories of Anna Aliluyeva, Stalin’s granddaughter, the film traces the rise of the Bolshevik tyrant from Lenin’s return from exile to his brutal struggle with Trotsky, the creation of his feared secret police and the merciless inner workings of his regime. As Anna recounts her grandfather’s life, viewers gain an intimate, personal perspective on the paranoia and purges that left even his closest circles living in constant fear.
In Ervin Lázár's story, which combines elements of fairy tale and reality, Peti moves the old lion, who goes by the name of Szigfrid Bruckner, into the abandoned barn. Peti later takes pity on the lonely lion and, with Viktor's help, sets out to free Szilvia, Szigfrid's partner, who is imprisoned in a circus. The operation is a success, but Peti's father decides to demolish the barn. Viktor and Gabriella do everything they can to stop the plan, but eventually Peti's father changes his mind and the inhabitants of the boy's imagination can live happily ever after in the abandoned barn.
In 1894, in Csuča, tragedy-stricken, from a blood-relative marriage, Boncza Berta is born. At the age of sixteen, at a girls' boarding school in Switzerland, she admires Jenő Törzs and Endre Ady with equal fervour. She writes poetry and believes in her drawing talent - but she cannot be mediocre - this girl who lives in literature is destined to live forever. Chinska's personality, which neither reckons nor wants to reckon with reality, naturally leads to the bitter ordeal of her marriage to Ady. After Ady's death, she does not want to be the 'widow of the nation'.
What can you expect from a 30-year-old man? Have a good job, car, house, wife, kids. And how is András doing on his 30th birthday? He's an excellent saxophonist and he has a brain, but no money, no wife, no car. In fact, he has never made love to two women at the same time in his life. He decides to make up for it in one day. By the time the candles on his birthday cake are lit at home in the evening, he wants to be done with all the things he should be. With precise plans, he sets off on his big adventure in the morning. The girl for a wife Andrew meets is a real mystery: she plays with men, lies a lot, cheats even more, and sometimes steals a little. No order, but her smile is irresistible...
On one hot summer night, the residents of a Hungarian apartment house slated for demolition restlessly revisit their haunted pasts as they face an uncertain future. In a gently turning kaleidoscope of dream imagery, regret-laden nostalgia and painstakingly intimate detail, the looming wrecking ball pales in significance to the accumulated experiences each dreamer revisits. Pre-war prejudice, occupying Nazis and Stalinist deprivations all come and go as each tenant’s backward glance yields moments of aching sensuality, infectious exuberance and catastrophic loss.
Zoltai is a Hungarian professor who returns home after a visit to the United States. Following a television interview, he commits suicide and leaves a note for his longtime friend Dr. Bardocz. The doctor and Zoltai's colleague Komindi join the police in investigating what drove the man to suicide.
A mediocre countryside actress is invited to a Budapest casting call. She hopes she might become the new Marilyn Monroe.
A focus on the tormented lives of intellectuals who failed to protest recent troubles in their homeland. Jancsó emphasizes highly evocative and ambiguous imagery over dialog or exposition as he – through visually fascinating imagery – depicts the painful, stunted lives of Hungary's intellectuals who have remained silent and ineffectual during various political crises.
A cardiologist is sent into retirement, but he feels at loss without his work. He returns to his home village to work as a general practitioner. This is the start of his ordeal: he's confronted with raw reality, which finally brings him to his knees. But music has the last word.
Veronika and Tibor are soon to be retired doctors. For Tibor's birthday his wife gives him an unusal gift. A prostitute.
Tucson, Arizona, September 1996. At the request of his son Martin, George Goldsmith tells him of his past in Nazi Germany as a member of a family of Jewish musicians and the strange history of the Jüdischer Kulturbund, a Jewish organization sponsored by Reichsminister Joseph Goebbels.
One day Novák Erzsébet kindergarten-teacher destroys her papers, cuts her hair and closes her mouth forever. She prepares for suicide namelessly, then somewhere around Normafa she accepts being taken into an asylum.
During World War II Eszter has to choose: she either follows her husband abroad, who is chased by the Gestapo or stays with her daughter from her first marriage.
As tensions grow between teenager Peti and his mother, the hope of a peaceful family celebration fades.
A metaphysical kammerspiel about political fight, betrayal, madness, focusing on a exiled communist couple during a train journey in the early months of WWII.
The film takes place in the outskirts at the end of the fifties. Gabi and Vince meet at the factory party. As the man learns that Gabi raises her little son alone, he does no longer want to marry her. An unclear and for Gabi humiliating relationship forms between them until the old suitor of Gabi, Feri appears.
