Balázs Béla Stúdió

A family slowly disintegrates under various pressures in late 1970s communist Hungary.

A man becomes acquainted with the mystery of female hands during a trip.

The documentary was shot in the prison for juvenile delinquents in Hungary. It does not aim at judging whether the perpetrators were convicted rightly or not but, given the burden they carry, how they can reintegrate into society after they are released.

Using verite conventions, a young couple with a baby and a child are worn away by the monotony of their lives.

A Hungarian Jew is forced to give a false testimony on his relatives in WW2 Hungary.

Eighteen years after the failure of the revolution and freedom fighting 1848-49, the politicians of Hungary preparing for a compromise with Austria try to make use of the symbol of the revolution, the figure of the poet Petőfi Sándor, to their own advantage. They visit all the memorial sites, find the witnesses and recall the famous events. Memories and political intentions conflict with each other, and the circumstances of the poet's death cannot be reconstructed entirely.

A grey-haired man walks through the fields. Fatigued, but with the same tenacity he roams the roads, the pathways, the tracks every day, medical bag in hand. Everyone awaits him: desperate or in hope, to the dying or to the woman in labour. He is the local GP. In fact, he is film director Imre Gyöngyössy’s father, the protagonist of one of his first short films. The personal narration based on the director’s poem is made complete by the pictures of Sándor Sára and István Gaál who were also active at Balázs Béla Studio at that time.

A twenty-year-old young man believes that sport and philosophical books help him to be strong enough to meet life, but his determination and will give way to depressing memories.

Huszárik's graduation film was another short entitled Groteszk (Grotesque) in 1963 about a strange train voyage of an artist carrying his own picture.

The twenty-minute film, divided into two parts, is made up of old newsreels and scenes recorded on the Budapest metro. The filmmaker places the celluloid tape, which is attached to the camera, on the trick table, examines the frames meticulously and cuts out individual details. The archival images are put into different contexts by different interventions.

Following Antal Végh's sociography the members of amateur film studio Cinema 64 recorded a 90 min 8mm film in the village of Penészlek in 1968. During a return to the village eight years later they have the chance to compare the changes from past to present in the lives of the local residents.

In the final days of the American Civil War, an emigre Hungarian military officer attempts to map the situation of the enemy. Many veterans of the 1848 War of Independence in Hungary fought on the northern side. Experienced Fiala, Boldogh who struggles with homesickness and the reckless Vereczky all experience their enforced emigration in different ways and news of impending peace elicits different reactions from them all.

A man, a woman, an afternoon, a city, and an unspoken, hopeful desire to find love by way of the personal ads. A milestone of Hungarian cinema, Elek uses documentary techniques in a fiction context to make the frailty of everyday life as palpable as possible.

The footage was shot in the writer's room a few days after his death. Everything in the room was untouched. The poet György Petri reads from one of Péter Hajnóczy's works, Miss Embolia. A sacred image of the Eastern European "beaten generation."

Ostensibly a non-narrative study of various aspects of a rural winter, this short film by one of modern Hungarian cinema’s greatest visual poets has all the spellbinding qualities of his better-known feature debut Sindbad (Szindbád, 1971), but here allied to a winning sense of humour that’s never quite allowed to detract from the haunting beauty of many of the images. The end of autumn is heralded by a few red leaves still clinging to a statue’s sculpted robes, while whip pans across the increasingly wintry landscape and close-ups of rippling water are given character by seemingly random freeze-frames and Zoltán Jeney’s electronic chirrups on the soundtrack. There are recurring shots of birds, migrating en masse, huddled by the icy water or lying individually dead, frozen stiff in the snow. So far Capriccio has been a reasonably generic mood piece, but then the snowmen arrive…

A Hungarian animation made in 1972 by Háy Ágnes

Black and White Short. Featuring collage centered around a drive through the country.

A film study in which the symbol of flight which contradicts human limitations inspires an emotional rhythm of scenes varying along three lines: the human desire for the sky (the first attempts for flight), the death of birds (experiments on animals) and the death of a human being in heights (a fall which isn´t a flight).