A German stage actor finds unexpected success and mixed blessings in the popularity of his performance in a Faustian play as the Nazis take power in pre-WWII Germany. As his associates and friends flee or are ground under by the Nazi terror, the popularity of his character supercedes his own existence until he finds that his best performance is keeping up appearances for his Nazi patrons.
Set in the 1890s on the Hungarian plains, a group of farm workers go on strike in which they face harsh reprisals and the reality of revolt, oppression, morality and violence.
A young woman leaves a state orphanage to find her mother in this interesting examination of how the overt repression of women in the older pattern of village life has been replaced by the more subtle exploitation inherent in the apparently freer existence of young girls in the contemporary city.
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 and then the other.
This romantic and grandiose historical film depicts the era of the constant incursions and heroic battles fought by the defenders of the castle of Eger, led by captain István Dobó, against the heavy odds of superior numbers through the lives and love of Bornemissza Gergely and Cecey Éva. Gergely is inaugurated as a fighter already at the age of 7, when he escapes the captivity of the half-eyed Turk, Jumurdzsak, with Vica and the war-booty. In thirty years' time he becomes the first assistant of captain Dobó and the brain of the castle in the defence of Eger.
The story shows Emma's and Böbe's fight for survival, for keeping their position in society which they achieved with hard work in the previous regime. They don't want to lose their place and become village girls again.
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...
The engineer Ambrus has been suspended in his job because he publicly called the attention of the customers to a construction mistake of some goods designed to be exported. His immediate boss learns the news on a business trip to Paris. He meets his old friend Lendvay, an emigrant from Hungary, and his French wife in a cellar bar. After their talk Benkő starts seeing things in a different perspective. When he returns home, he decides to take a stand for Ambrus against Ferenczi, the general director, despite his wife's and the old director's advice.
Eve, the old professor zsongják beautiful wife surrounded by colleagues. When the professor's going away for a conference abroad, intensifying the suitors attempts. Eve, however faithful to her husband, so that the denials are increasing. Oddly enough, the rejected accidents ...
Savanyú and his friend work at a plant. After the monotonous shifts they engage in the pleasures of the afternoon and the night, i.e. parties and concerts. Savanyú dates Juli, they are already engaged. The young men live as sub-tenants, the young women in workers' hostels. None of these places are suited for spending time together. They are in need of an apartment. Out of the ruinous apartment which they lay siege on, however, they are sent away by the otherwise friendly policeman. At a concert held in the Park of Youth, Juli gets to know Géza. They flirt, then go to the country with a pop-group. Savanyú and his friends follow them. A minor fight cools the atmosphere.
Set during the fading glory of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the film tells of the rise and fall of Alfred Redl, an ambitious young officer who proceeds up the ladder to become head of the Secret Police only to become ensnared in political deception.
The Toth family resides in Northern Hungary. The couple has a daughter and a son, the latter a member of the armed forces. When his weary major is ordered to take a vacation, the son talks him into a visit to his family home. Comedy ensues when the Toths go overboard trying to make things pleasant for the visiting major in hopes of an easier life for their son the soldier.
Hungary, 1950s. József Pelikán, who works as a dam keeper on the Danube, meets by chance Zoltán Dániel, an old friend whom he saved from death years before and who is now a powerful politician.
The celebrated actor considers his wife a nitwits actress of a mediocre talent. But an influential playwright, a friend of theirs, has written a play with the main role designed for her, Kati, particularly. Its title is "The Most Intelligent Woman in the World". On the day of the first night performance Kati recalls their past, the times she had together with her husband.
Political and sexual repression in Hungary, just after the revolution of 1956. In 1958, the body of Eva Szalanczky, a political journalist, is discovered near the border. Her friend Livia is in hospital with a broken neck; Livia's husband, Donci, is under arrest. In a flashback to the year before, we see what leads up to the tragedy. Eva gets a job as a writer. She meets Livia and is attracted to her. Livia feels much the same, but as a married woman, has doubts and hesitations. In their work, they (and Eva in particular) bang up against the limits of telling political truths; in private, they confront the limits of living out sexual and emotional truth.
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 1919, in Petrograd, a pilot Sevastyanov was asked to help in training flight personnel for the young Hungarian republic, together with a Hungarian journalist he makes a desperate, with many adventures, flight across the front to Hungary ...
Shot in B&W, Gyula Gazdag's film follows the surreal and often comic quests of young Andris, an orphan searching for a father who doesn't exist, and Orban, a government clerk who's had enough of oppressive bureaucracy.
The preparation, in Hungary, of the assassination in Marseilles of King Alexander of Yugoslavia in 1934.
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.
