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.
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.
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.
Szegedi Anna, a lawyer having just arrived back from Naples wants to divorce his husband, also a lawyer, because since a hot night she has only been thinking of Laczkó, the handsome businessman.
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.
Six physical workers, once working for Videoton, decide to come together and create a company on their own.
Csutak is just a pain in the neck, the little boy is even excluded from play by his mates. Vacation is spent lonely until one day he sneaks the woman haulier's old, shabby horse, a creature that would be better off in a slaughterhouse, out with himself. Possessing the animal is the key to the children's gang. They all try to find a place for the horse.
A woman and her lover plot to kill her older husband.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Directed by Tamás Fejér
During WW II, a Hungarian child in a concentration camp is saved and raised by a Polish family. After 19 years, the young woman publishes a letter in local papers looking for her long-lost family. This documentary from Laszlo Nadasy follows the search for her relatives, commenting on the realities she faced in the camp and the emotions of those involved in her life.
Kicsi Dániel, the young virtuoso pianist gets a separate apartment in the ten-storey block of flats. He rehearses all the time, irregularly, day and night, disturbing thus the peace of the dwellers in the thin-walled house. Inquisition begins in the name of equal rights for inhabitants.
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 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.