Balázs Béla Stúdió

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

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

The film depicts the lives of veterans of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution in the American Civil War, based in part on an Ambrose Bierce story. The whole film was re-edited using his own method called "light editing" in order to make it resemble a damaged silent film from the late 1800s.

A playful portrait of a young woman who merrily roams the streets of Budapest. A New Wave love letter in motion.

Often called a “film poem” or a “film symphonie” Huszárik’s masterpiece consists of montages of horses from the dawn of time to the modern times from cave paintings to horse races. (MUBI)

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…

Documentary about the Italian men that visit Hungary to meet girls and the Hungarian women that fall in love with them.

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.

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.

The documentary-feature film taking place in the seventies is the "development novel" of Cséplő György, the intelligent and ambitious Gypsy boy. Having finished only two terms at school, the eighteen-year-old boy leaves Németfalu with two of his companions to find employment in Budapest and to break out of his miserable existence in the village cottage with the help of his small savings.

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 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."

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

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.

This film of three parts recalls memories from World War II. The titles of the parts are: Impartially, Terrified and Like a scream.

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

Lajos Mezei is a middle-aged, insignificant, average man. He works at the post office sorting letters with a machine. His life is but a series monotonous everyday events, but he has a passion that makes him different from his fellow humans. This passion replaces all human relationships and events in his life. He flees into a world of his own, hermetically sealed, which only he can understand and where he therefore feels safe. One day, however, his well-balanced life is turned upside down.

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.