József Madaras
Weird Science Fiction. Directed by Ivan and Igor Buharov.
Hungary, end of World War II. Five Hungarian soldiers desert their troop which has been directed to Germany. They are escaping with the help of a stamp and unfilled travelling warrants, trying to survive until the war ends.
When Hungary's newest prime minister is shot and killed at a reception, the resulting investigation is necessarily swift and comprehensive. This compelling political thriller uncovers two prime suspects: the woman who guns the leader down, and a man who was friends with both the prime minister and his murderer. Using video surveillance footage, as well as other more artful and symbolic imagery, the noted "visualist" director Miklos Jancso, who is known for his craft in getting his points across non-verbally, combines fantasy and reality in a highly ironic manner.
From the film-shooting in the Buda Castle Marci and his friend go to a well-paying job. The scene is a big castle in the middle of a huge park. They enjoy the company of the Kid and the beautiful naked French girl, Nathalie. Their job is to watch the monitors on which they can see the Moscow coup détat. By the time Gorbachev is executed the Communist and the Nationalists have taken turns in occupying the castle and the park.
When a group of people from different walks of life converge in a Hungarian castle situated in Budapest which has been sealed for 500 years, they bring with them a werewolf which slowly begins to cut their numbers down.
Zoltai is a Hungarian professor who returns home after a visit to the United States. Following a television interview, he commits suicide and leaves a note for his longtime friend Dr. Bardocz. The doctor and Zoltai's colleague Komindi join the police in investigating what drove the man to suicide.
The unskilled, jack-of-all-trades András and his wife, Éva are put in jail for serial work-place thefts, -committed in order to try to ensure a normal living standard for his family - and for aggravated assault committed for self-defence, respectively. Their two small children are put in state care, then given to foster parents. András, still in prison, commits everything to help the released Éva get hold of an apartment and get their children back so that when he will have served his term the family could be together again.
A historical drama set in the 1400s, a young man sent to Italy but is forced back after his father's mysterious death.
More than a storyline with a beginning, middle, and end, this tale of a foundry worker who engages a woman -- and fellow worker -- to do housekeeping for him is a tale that holds up the Hungarian social system against the morality of an exploitative male-female relationship. After his wife dies, the rough-cut and intentionally nameless "man" (Jozsef Madaras) eventually coerces the "woman" (Julianna Nyako) into doing his housework for a small remuneration. Everything goes along passably well for awhile, until the man adds in more household responsibility in the form of chickens to raise. Due to extra work at the factory, the woman cannot tend to the chickens as she should and the result is that some of them die. The man is furious, verbally abuses her, and then rapes her. Later, the woman discovers she is pregnant, with dire consequences.
The movie portrays a peasant revolt in Hungary in the early twentieth century.
A World War II-style "war game" setting the wealthy customers against skilled mercenaries goes awry when the simulated war gets too real.
Zsadányi flees from the authorities with his goddaughter, Bankós Mari, and they escape into the forest. The film then skips ahead thirty-fold years: Zsadány and Mari are now lovers, with the sound of war in the background halting their romance. The old friends of Zsadányi have joined with the Nazis, and the landowner living with his peasants in a socialist community grows distant from them. Zsadányi is held responsible for political problems in the country, and will pay with his life.
The film tells the story of a regiment of Hungarian hussars stationed in Poland. The hussars, mostly ordinary men, have heard news of the uprising and wish to return to the homeland to defend the newly independent country. The Empire, on the other hand, is firmly resolved that all Hungarian troops in the imperial army should be kept as far away from the trouble spot as possible, knowing that most soldiers would be loyal to Budapest rather than Vienna.
In 1950, when a young communist director arrives to take charge of a stud farm, his efforts to draw on the experience of the old hands there meet with little success. Indeed, so outraged are they at the changeover to communism that they harass him at every turn, especially after he treats a local barmaid as if she were a whore of some kind. After administering a beating to him, the old hands are nonetheless incensed when he calls on the police. The director doesn't get enough help, however, because the stable hands stab him before running off for the border.
Director Sandor Simo based this film on his recollections of a period in his father's life just after World War II. In the film, Janos Torok is a chemist and an entrepreneur With enormous enthusiasm, he gets loans to purchase a small chemical plant and begins experiments to create innovative products, such as hormones. Meanwhile, the communist party has come to dominate Hungarian life in such a way that his activities are viewed as little more than criminal. He is hauled away to a prison camp, but even then his letters home are full of boundless optimism and his ideas for further experiments.
"Budapest Tales" is about a group of people (consisting of Szabo regular Andras Balint along with Ildiko Bansagi and Karoly Kovacs) who find a broken down tram while trying to go to the city. The people band together and try to get the tram back on the train tracks and head towards the city. Along this journey the passengers encounter many people who join them on the tram. What started out as only a handful of people has now turned into a small village. As the people travel on to the city each person takes on certain roles and through the course of time these roles will change. Some people fall in love, others out of love, and a few even die. But life goes on. The people keep the tram going hoping to reach Budapest.
This satire on film depicts the micro-climate of a technical vocational school newly established at a housing estate. The construction vocational school holds a name-giving ceremony, thus calling the attention of its supervisory organ to itself. The school-master distributes as well as receives presents from the sponsoring factory, and the pupils sit for a written examination of unheard-of material. The results are devastating, which the despotic school-master attempts to conceal by a staged disciplinary procedure.
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.
4-part TV series of Jules Verne's "Michael Strogoff: The Courier of the Czar"
The film takes place at the end of 1946. Rumours are spread that the food supply will not arrive for it has been robbed. Workers of the metal factory go on strike.
While awaiting his release from the Soviet detention camp he is being held in, a half-starved refugee (Andras Ambrus) finds that an error has been made and his name is not on the to-be-released list. It is then that he is forced to assume the identity of a dead man whose name is on the list. Ambrus at first refuses, but because he was an orphan and cannot produce evidence of his true identity, he has no other choice. However, when he returns to the outer world and the community he was raised in, he is greeted with suspicion. When he tries to claim his part-ownership of a farm from his adopted uncle, he is refused and beaten by farmhands the uncle sets on him.
It has been fifteen years since the death of her father, Agamemnon, and Elektra still burns with hatred for Aegisztosz, who conspired with Elektra's mother to kill him.
A musical farce about women in the canning factory. The pretty Brigitta tries to commit suicide, because Laci left her, pregnant, but her mates save her.
The story of the film takes place in 1929 in a model prison providing a kind of reflection how society works out there. Udvardi, the weakling and indulgent director is experimenting with putting in practice a kind of pseudo-humanist utopia about the institution of a 'civilised prison'.
The film is based on a true story. Jakus, managing director of a scooter-factory suddenly resigns, since he disagrees with his superiors in the ministry on several points. Disregarding the attacks of his family and friends, he returns to his original job and becomes a welder, which is not very easy because of his records.
This film shows us around a factory in the seventies in Hungary. In the outskirts factory of Kőbánya workers celebrate the foundation members and want to present the oldest member, Uncle Benda, now a pensioner, with a golden ring. His grandson, Karcsi Merkovics, an industrial apprentice, is in love with the foreman's daughter.
The narrative concerns the barbaric exploits of Attila The Hun and yet none of the characters ever leave the remote seaside stretch of land on which the film is set or do much of anything – with the ensuing moralizing interrupted only by the occasional (and equally obscure) music-infused rites.
Everyone loves little Junior, but nobody has time for him. So Junior decides to find Time with the help of his friends - dwarves.
Alegory of the suppression of the 1919 revolution and the advent of fascism in Hungary; in the countryside, a unit of the revolutionary army spares the life of father Vargha, a fanatical priest. He comes back and leads massacres. A new force, represented by Feher, apparently avanges the people, but only to impose a different, more refined and effective kind of repression.
Barbara (Monica Vitti) is a journalist investigating the local counterculture who becomes involved, after an unpleasant start of battery and stalking, with Pierre Clémenti's louche all-around dropout.
It is the story of Bálint Balassi , the poet and warrior. The scene is Hungary at the end of the 16th century. The soldiers stationed at the castles of Hungary's border defence-system spend their days with anti-Turkish raids, hunting and womanising.
Paralleling the dramatic student protests and riots that were exploding across the world in the 1960s at the time the film was made, The Confrontation is a story of protest and rebellion in 1947 Hungary when the Communist Party have just taken power. Jancsó's first colour film is another virtuoso display by a director at the peak of his powers, and eloquently explores the complex issues and inherent problems of revolutionary democracy.
SS doctor during the war worked on the serum of cancer, but discovered a terrible poison, one vial is enough to kill 100 000 people. 20 years after the war, the old Nazi gets out of prison, and the hunt for him and his discovery begins.
In the mid-1930s a group of Croatian anarchists cross the dense forests at the northern border of Yugoslavia in an effort to seek refuge in Hungary.
An aspiring film student is denied a scholarship to the state-funded university when his father is thrown in jail. The man had stopped a train in order to facilitate the union between two old friends. The son then takes a job as a land surveyor and meets a Greek man who works towards the collective benefits of the peasants. The man is killed in a peasant uprising prompted by a bureaucratic boondoggle. The surveyor looks after the man's widow as his emerging political and social awareness leads him take a stand against government injustice. Another incident, in which gypsies are rounded up by state hygiene workers, further galvanizes the man's beliefs. He photographs the incident, and his work allows him to be accepted into the school from which he was previously denied admission.
Andras Kovacs' film, considered one of the most important Hungarian films of the 1960s, centers around four men who await trial for their involvement in the massacre of several thousand Jewish and Serbian people of Novi Sad in 1942. Each denies any responsibility, claiming that they were only following orders. The film is significant for its willingness to address the subject of Hungary's role in WWII, which was taboo at the time of the its release.
Végh Márta, the teacher is looking for her student Vadász Ica in the Buda villa, but she only finds the tenant, Mrs. Paár - dead. The investigation reveals that Mrs. Paár was murdered for an invaluable stamp, the "Fake Isabella".
Set during a turbulent era of disquiet, fear, persecution and terror, which permeates every corner of post-WWI Hungarian society. In 1919, after just a few months of communist rule the Hungarian Republic of Councils falls victim to a nationalist counter-revolution. Admiral Horthy, leader of the nationalist far right movement, becomes the self-proclaimed regent of Hungary, and assumes power as the legal Head of State. Soldiers of the short-lived Hungarian Red Army are now on the run from relentless secret policemen and patrol units of the nationalist Royal Gendarme. If caught, ex-Red Army soldiers are executed without mercy or proper trial. István Cserzi, a former soldier of the Red Army has fled to the Great Hungarian Plains and has taken refuge on a farm, which is run by two sympathetic women. Due to the generosity of these women and a former childhood pal...
In 1919, Hungarian Communists aid the Bolsheviks' defeat of Czarists, the Whites. Near the Volga, a monastery and a field hospital are held by one side then the other.
Set in a detention camp in Hungary in 1869 at a time of guerilla campaigns against the ruling Austrians.
The film takes place in the outskirts at the end of the fifties. Gabi and Vince meet at the factory party. As the man learns that Gabi raises her little son alone, he does no longer want to marry her. An unclear and for Gabi humiliating relationship forms between them until the old suitor of Gabi, Feri appears.
In the final days of World War II, a young Hungarian is making his way home, through countryside full of the debris of war, when he is captures and imprisoned by Russians. Left in the custody of a young Russian soldier, the two youths form a friendship in spite of not speaking each other's language.
The film is a ballad about the dwellers of a block-of-flats in Angyalföld.
On the crowded train, the workers entertain each other by telling stories.
Gráci has been recently released from a reformatory school. His old gang would like to involve him in a new action, but he hesitates. His past record is bad enough already, and he would not like to get into new trouble.
