The Fifth Seal 1976
In 1944 Budapest, one of a group of four friends poses a hypothetical moral question to the others, an act that will unexpectedly alter their lives forever.
In 1944 Budapest, one of a group of four friends poses a hypothetical moral question to the others, an act that will unexpectedly alter their lives forever.
This story follows a young student, who is orphaned as she grows to adulthood in the shadow of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Coming from the Communist intelligentsia, she sees her friends and family react differently. Her lover, a married factory manager, supports the patriots and later assists fellow workers in staging a strike. Meanwhile her sister and others express anger at being forced from their homes during the revolution and continue to express a hatred for the rebels afterwards. But in the end they realize that for all people, real life is not possible after the revolt and its brutal suppression by the Soviets and their collaborators.
A young doctor undergoes a spiritual crisis when he returns to his rural home.
A story of a mother who had to change her profession from a teacher to a high class prostitute to make a living.
In the dense and murky woodlands of provincial Hungary, the search for a child murderer drags a once-respected detective into an all-consuming obsession enshrouded by irresolution and despair, even long after he has been taken off the case. What emerges is not a crime story, but a harrowing venture through the darkness of the human soul.
Áron is a happy child in his family. But at some point things take a different turn, and his mother starts to lose her health rapidly. As this happens, the man in charge decides what's best for Áron without consulting the young boy's opinion, and the boy finds himself thrown out of his warm home into an orphanage in the woods. He's utterly displeased by what's happening, without knowing he has yet to face much worse...
A Budapest high school in the beginning of the 1960s. Dini suffers the torments of adolescence. His father had to leave Hungary after the uprise in 1956, and since then Dini's mother has had to take care of her two sons on her own. A friend of Dini’s father, Bodor, is released from prison and moves in with them. Dini and his brother are far from happy about this intrusion on their family life.
Two arts students, András and Viktor who are writing their thesis on detective stories, make up a story and keep nagging the famous film-director, who just came back from Hollywood, until he undertakes the job. At night they work on the film, in which two youths kill a director returning from the US. In the morning the director is found dead - a knife in his back.
A woman and her lover plot to kill her older husband.
Turn-of-the-century Hungary. Two young brothers, neglected by their cold and uncaring mother, descend deeper and deeper into psychosis, with tragic consequences.
A World War II-style "war game" setting the wealthy customers against skilled mercenaries goes awry when the simulated war gets too real.
Vendel Imre is a driver, his wife is expecting a baby, they have two sons. Before 1945 Vendel was a military officer. In 1951 they receive a letter from the Ministry of Interior: they will be transported to a forced domicile, allowed to take 50 kg personal belongings per person with them.
Directed by Tamás Fejér
Merry soldiers arrive in the sleepy Transdanubian town. The cynical woman-hunter, Ferdinándy, learns to know doctor Barlay's beautiful wife at a carnival. She lives a happy married life, and the attentions of the lieutenant are all in vain.
The film director starts shooting his film about the manager of a large corporation who committed suicide for mysterious reasons. As the cumbersome process of making a film goes along, everybody involved in it starts having differing opinions of the tragedy, its causes and its victim.
On one hot summer night, the residents of a Hungarian apartment house slated for demolition restlessly revisit their haunted pasts as they face an uncertain future. In a gently turning kaleidoscope of dream imagery, regret-laden nostalgia and painstakingly intimate detail, the looming wrecking ball pales in significance to the accumulated experiences each dreamer revisits. Pre-war prejudice, occupying Nazis and Stalinist deprivations all come and go as each tenant’s backward glance yields moments of aching sensuality, infectious exuberance and catastrophic loss.
The subject-matter of this comedy is age-old: that of the schizophrenic soul. Papa would have liked boy twins years ago, but her wife gave birth to a single child weighing six kilograms. He would like to dampen his feeling of emptiness by having the boy registered both as Péter and Pál.
Irén and Attila, a not-so-young couple, are in love. All they want is a flat of their own where they could live together. Unfortunately, Hungary in the 70s is no place for dreams.
Reviewers found this somewhat surreal film so visually stunning as to be worth watching even when it was not clear to them what was going on. In the story, Jozef Schrevek is a man with unusual powers which he wishes to pass on to his son before his death, which is coming soon. Unfortunately, his son is much more interested in boozing and womanizing and being a well-known habitué of nightclubs, than in taking his father seriously and receiving his powers and the responsibilities which come along with them. The tension between the two escalates when a young woman enters their lives.
In the country reformatory school both the teacher and the children are trapped by the circumstances. From among the pupils excels Sanyi, who cannot accept the fact that his mother does not love him and he keeps on escaping after her. From among the teachers it is Mr. Csőrös who distinguishes himself by listening to the children, looking for those who escaped, Sanyi feels affection to him.