34th Hungarian Film Week Budapest 2003

Hungarian cinema is not just back on course again, but young filmmakers are leading the way. After the international success in 2002 of Palfi György’s Hukkle (Hiccups) and Kornel Mundruczo’s Pleasant Days, both shot on shoestring budgets and each backed with plenty of creative imagination, now another talented young filmmaker has emerged at the 34th Hungarian Film Week (31 January ­ 5 February 2003). Benedek Fliegauf’s Forest was awarded the prestigious Wolfgang Staudte Prize by the jury for the International Forum of Young Cinema at the Berlinale just a week after it had premiered at the Hungarian Film Week in Budapest.

        On the surface, Forest can be taken as another of those Dogma films flooding the international festivals ­ save that the official »Dogma certificate« stopped at 31 last June and the film was shot with a digital camera. »I had wanted to make a Dogma film for a long time, but never got the opportunity,« said Fliegauf in an interview. »I had been carrying the screenplay around with me for quite some time, and one day I was lucky enough to stumble across a brilliant cameraman (Zoltan Lovasi) and an understanding producer, who secured the financial basis for the project.« Forest ­ as in »you can’t see the trees for the forest« ­ is an episode film with seven different stories, which taken together portray from different perspectives the rather warped lives and dark mores of young people living in Budapest today. Their conversations are as mundane as the individuals themselves.

        By contrast, Zsolt Kedzi-Kovacs’s That Day was Ours, a two-hours-plus video documentary, chronicles the activities of students at the Budapest Film and Drama School in Budapest on the first day of the 1956 uprising. Several famous filmmakers can be seen in the demonstration, and their accounts of events that happened nearly a half-century ago are both revealing and contradictory. Also, Karoly Makk’s A Long Weekend in Pest and Buda links with Makk’s Love (1970), a highlight of the Cannes festival over thirty years ago and one of the best Hungarian films made. A Long Weekend features Mari Torocsik again in a reckoning with the 1956 uprising.

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