El perro negro
Filmmaker Péter Forgács compiles home movies by a family of Catalan industrialists who have documented their lives as their homeland is besieged by labor unrest, the collapse of the monarchy, the rise of anarchism, and ultimately the Spanish Civil War.
Forgács Péter
Also Directed by Forgács Péter
Anthology film made as an act of protest against Hungarian government of Viktor Orban.
Forgacs’s Tractatus is composed of seven short video essays that refer to one of Wittgenstein’s most influential works, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, first published in 1921.
The internationally acclaimed director and recipient of the Erasmus Award in 2007, Péter Forgács created a documentary exploring the fate of hundred thousands of Hungarian men and women who arrived to the United States between 1890 and 1921. To tell their sagas Forgács weaved this grand epic from the early American cinema, found footage, photographs and interviews. The film reveals the difficult moments of arrival, integration and assimilation, which eventually fed the happiness of the later generations and their fulfillment of the American dream.
Free fall reflects to the times before the Shoah, the darkest chapter of the 20th century Hungary, based on the home movies of the talented musician, photographer and businessman, György Pető who made 8mm films from 1938.
Peter Forgacs' Bibo Breviarium (Istvan Bibo's Fragments) is a look at Istvan Bibo, one of the most revered Hungarian philosophers and politicians of the 20th century. The images in the film consist of found footage from the man's life, while the audio consists of an ongoing monologue that alternates between biographical information on the man and quotes from his writings. Paul Merrick performs the narration on the English translation of the film.
Main character of AZ ÖRVÉNY is cameraman György Petö. His private films shot before and during World War II document his family, and particularly his girlfriend and later wife Eva Lengyel. With hindsight, these films, mainly recorded in the southern Hungarian city of Szeged, make up an extremely wry historical document. Petö was a Jew. Slowly but gradually we notice how the anti-Jewish laws and political revolutions in Hungary take the family in a stranglehold. AZ ÖRVÉNY is a rhapsody of found footage. Skillfully edited and complemented with additional footage, it produces an account of an atrocious era and a plea for human dignity.
The protagonist of Picturesque Epochs is Mária Gánóczy (1927-), a painter and a film aficionado who comes from a family of female artists as far back as her great-grandparents. She brought up nine children with her husband József Breznay (1916-2012), a fellow painter. Gánóczy's films and paintings immortalised the checkered history of Central Europe.
A trip nearest to the boundaries of life and death: back and forth.
This film is constructed from the diary films of Zoltan Bartos, amateur filmmaker and composer of popular dance music. Shot from the 1920s through the middle of the 1950s, the film reflects both private and official history.
Angelos Papanastassiou, the man behind the camera, a story of a Greek patrician of WW2 times Athens. In the very first days of the Nazi occupation Angelos decided to record and document the Greece motherland's sufferings. Using a clandestine 16-mm film camera risking daily his own, and his families life, filmed, documented the Nazi atrocities in Athens all through the German-Italian occupation. Meanwhile his daughter, Loukia was born and we follow her first steps as the family life images juxtaposed over the tragic chapter of modern Greek history. Angelos Papanastassiou secretly developed, edited and saved the films, which later become one of the principal evidence of the Nazi atrocities at the Nuremberg Trials 1947. The Angelos’ Film composed from a unique film journal of wartime Athens and offers a new insight to Greece’s past, with the music of Tibor Szemzõ.