Sancti Spiritus

An American film director screening his new film in Budapest meets one of the subjects of that film. What begins as a simple chat over coffee turns into an alternately comic and suspenseful road trip.

Hour by hour the ancient face of repeated / Beings changes, and hour by hour, / Thinking, we get older. / Everything passes, unknown, and the knower / Who remains knows he knows not. / But nothing, Aware or unaware, returns. / Equals, therefore, of what isn’t our equal, / Let us preserve, in the heat we remember, / The flame of the spent hour. Ricardo Reis (Fernando Pessoa)

Short film by Roger Deutsch.

Short film by Roger Deutsch.

Roger tells a story he kept secret for a long time.

We all live on the same planet, under one sun which nurtures and renews our unique and common hopes for the future. No matter how much we differ from each other in color, ethnicity and belief, we all share the same source of life, united in our destinies. An omnibus film on the topic of Turkish - Armenian relations.

Filmed in 1974 and edited and released in 1983 (and then rereleased by its director in 2005), DEAD PEOPLE purports to document the final years of Frank Butler, a local fixture in the depressed burg of Ellicot City with a particular fondness for drink and tales of the dead. Over hazy 16mm footage two decades later, Deutsch adopted a painfully unsentimental view of his early approach, colored as it was by notions of ethnographic film and an undercurrent of fetishism for a man he considered somehow more "alive" than himself. While it chafes against notions of authenticity in documentary and incisively hints at the complicity of the subject in inventing his own history, DEAD PEOPLE simultaneously oozes nostalgia, transcending its own judgment as a gauzy memorial for the man Deutsch once called a friend.

A structuralist film about narrative structure, "Intermezzo" compresses five cinematic melodramas by compiling parallel fragments through a polyphonic over-lapping of time-frames, to foreground the meta-narrative behind the genre, yet remains a melodrama at heart. The motion pictures used are (in order of appearance) Gregory Ratoff: Intermezzo (1939), Douglas Sirk: Interlude (1957), John M. Stahl: When Tomorrow Comes (1939), David Lean: Summertime (1955) and Gustav Molander: Intermezzo (1936).

Chronicling the history of his family from 1787 to now while looking for the answers to some buried secrets regarding certain relatives, Roger Deutsch (The Boy on the Train) soothingly voices over his latest effort - a poetic, travelogue-esque 30-minute documentary which takes the viewer on an engaging personal journey from Hungary to America and back via beautiful vintage photographs, grainy home videos (that often look better than professional and persistently stand the test of time), as well as his own impressionistic footage, with the unique experience enhanced by excellent musical choices. —Nikola Gocic