‘Hungary’ Archives
You…
Te Hungary, 1962, black and white, 10 minsOne of the first films by one of Hungary's greatest contemporary directors, You... is a delightful jeu d'ésprit with a distinctly French nouvelle vague flavour: in particular, it's strongly reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard's Une Femme Mariée (1964), though Szabó's film was made a couple of years earlier. [...]
Hungarian New Wave: Melancholy and Silence
During the dozen or so days I spent at the Era New Horizons festival in Wrocław last month, I divided much of my time between compulsory jury duty (i.e. watching all thirteen films in the New Polish Films competition) and sampling as much as my schedule would allow of their mouthwatering 1960s/70s Hungarian retrospective, 'Melancholy and [...]
Check the Gate 2009
The second Check the Gate festival of Hungarian films in London will take place from 25th to 30th June. While last year's line-up consisted of six relatively recent titles, this year they've upped the total to ten and there's a much greater concentration on acknowledged classics, dating back forty years to the late Péter Bacsó's delicious The [...]
The East End Film Festival
The 2009 East End Film Festival launches tomorrow - in the words of the organisers:The East End Film Festival showcases hot new talent and homegrown films alongside larger independent releases and special events, informing and inspiring a new generation of filmmakers and audiences from across London and beyond, and raising the profile of this [...]
40th Hungarian Film Week
The 40th Hungarian Film Week is running from 27 January to 3 February 2009, and Magyar Filmunió have just announced the final line-up. In total, 101 recent Hungarian productions are screening across five categories (feature, short, documentary, scientific, television), including 26 new feature films. Seven of the competition entries are by [...]
The Investigator
A nyomozó Hungary, 2008, colour, 110 minsBy some distance the most enjoyable new Hungarian film I've seen this year, Attila Gigor's feature debut owes a huge amount to traditional noir-styled murder mysteries, but gives all the familiar ingredients a genuinely original spin - while injecting plenty of deliciously dry black comedy into the [...]
Tarr in Turin
Since 1988's Damnation (Kárhozat) inaugurated his mature style, Béla Tarr's films have been distinguished at least as much by Kubrick-like gaps between their release as by their intrinsic artistic qualities, with just Sátántangó (1994), Werckmeister Harmonies (Werckmeister harmóniák, 2000) and The Man From London (A Londoni férfi, 2007) [...]
Delta
Hungary, 2008, colour, 93 minsBy some distance the most sheerly beautiful film I saw in the 2006 Sarajevo Film Festival was the Croatian short Delta, directed by Stanislav Tomić - an almost wordless study of the lives of people who live and fish by the mouth of the Danube. Kornél Mundruczó’s feature has the same title, is set in a [...]
Girls
Lányok Hungary, 2007, colour, 90 minsThe opening titles of Anna Faur's disturbing feature debut begin with what looks like a standard disclaimer about the events and people depicted in the film being imaginary – presumably a Hungarian audience would have picked up on the fact that she sourced her material from a true story that hit the [...]