The Long Ride

The film evokes the era of the 1831 cholera epidemic and the peasant uprising which followed it. The way of Doctor Balás, cholera commissioner, and district administrator Hunyor leads through the mountains of Zemplén and is lined by unburied corpses, peasants dying of the illness and of overdoses of bismuth, by the miserably starving population, the healthy digging mass-graves and by uncultivated lands.

A short film by Pál Gábor.

A short film by Pál Gábor.

A short film by Pál Gábor.

Angi Vera, as a promising young woman, gets invited to a Communist training center to undergo the next level of indoctrination into Party life. She begins to realize how people get ahead in the Party: by saying things they don't mean but think are politically correct; by becoming friends with Party dignitaries, even if you don't like them; by being seen as a dedicated worker (as opposed to actually being a dedicated worker).

In the first half of the fifties Júlia, the weaver meets engineer Szél on a visit with "educative" purpose, who raises his three children alone in a mighty villa. Júlia is willing to take care of the adolescent children and she moves in to the villa. She falls in love with the man but he is not able to express true, deep feelings.

István and Jakab are fire-extinguisher experts. They travel the country to check fire-extinguishers at country factories. During their tours of inspection they chase women, drink in dirty pubs and live in clover.

The teenage boy, Giuseppe, lives with his mother in Cammarata, a Sicilian mountain village. His father left the family years ago, and has since then settled down as a guest worker in West-Germany and established a family. Under local moral rules, Maria is a so-called "white widow", who must stay faithful to her husband even if he never returns to her again. Maria and the newly arrived young doctor fall in love with each other. Their happiness is frowned upon not only by Giuseppe, but the entire village as well as the distant husband.