Elie Wiesel Goes Home

This two-part film examines the plight of the working class. In part one, an elderly factory laborer goes to work in his last days before he is forced to retire. He leaves the factory life he has always known and goes home to his wife. In the second part, a young farm boy goes off to an industrial trade school to prepare for the very work the old man left behind. The old man loses his freedom by forced retirement while the young man loses his freedom by becoming a worker faced with a lifetime of factory work.

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.

Persuaded by the janitor's wife, a lively, but lonesome old woman, who is only attached to the world through her cherished objects and memories, decides to exchange her two-room apartment for a smaller one. For a little while her everyday life is changed. She meets and entertains new people every day.

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.

The Hungarian Maria's Day is set in that most fateful of years, 1848. The incredible changes and reverses in European politics and culture exert a potent influence on one aristocratic Hungarian family. Losing virtually everything in the way of creature comforts, the family tries to keep up appearances. Eventually every member of the clan falls victim to illness, syphilis and their own headstrong foolishness. The parallels drawn by director Judith Elek between the dissipation of 19th century Hungarian aristocracy and the corruption of Communist ideology in modern times are inescapable.

The film shows the heartbreaking state and life of the castles of Keszthely, szecseny, godollo, szigliget, hedervar and their former inhabitants.

Katherine, who survived the Holocaust at age seven, visits her fatherland of Transylvania, Romania for the first time departing from Sweden with her family. Not only do both happy and frightful memories of her forgotten past come to life, but she must also face the depressing reality of Ceausescu's communist dictatorship and the romance developing between her husband and her sister. Parallel to her story and simultaneously, we get to know her childhood love and friend Sandor, who serves the dictator as a forester and whose story has a tragic ending. The film ends with the surprising and odd encounter of the two stories.

Film by Judit Elek.