Emese Vasvári

Ema & Death’s-Head deals with the precarious border between humanism and the protection of one’s own life in situations when one excludes the other. Marika Sándorfi is hiding a Jewish boy during the dramatic era of the First Slovak State on the Slovak-Hungarian border. Šimon Holan, the boy in hiding, has a special ability to survive thanks to dreaming and a child’s fantasy.

A new National Theatre is built, and the director hires a famous Danish director for the premiere performance. The actors rehearse, the tractor and the construction workers work on the almost finished building. Everything seems to be on track, including the train, unfortunately, on the siding of the bridge next to the theatre. It's a little too loud and it's echoing into the main hall, so rehearsals are squeezed into a room that isn't very big. Bridge cushions are coming, even though it's cold and a bit like Christmas, but most importantly, the art is happening and the lead actress is indeed a queen. She falls in love with her partner and destroys him at the end of the performance. The role takes shape, only sometimes it is eerily similar to the real life of the artists. Will they live to see the premiere?

As a result of a medical drug experiment, Misi will be able to travel through time, but only if he drinks from a special homemade spirit.

Iván is living in exile from Hungary when he receives word that an old flame is ill. His return to Budapest rekindles old memories and reopens old wounds.

A couple of two middle-aged women and the stuffy atmosphere of a little Hungarian town – will it end in a witch-hunt? A painter moves in with her partner, an art teacher. The rumors spread fast, the local public opinion boils and the librarian plans a reading from a famous children’s story book “A Fairytale for Everyone”, where Cinderella is Romany, while the Snow Queen is a lesbian. This story is based on true events – its scenario was written by local society members and life itself. Local people also decided to play in the movie along with professional actors.

The idyllic life of the enlightened Jacobins of the 18th-century Hungarian countryside is unexpectedly turned upside down by the arrival of Emperor Donald Trump and his retinue. The Jacobins call for the help of the celestials and Melania Trump to drive out the intruder.

aurA is a beautiful girl, a wandering soul, maybe just a ghost. She lives in a strange city, among strange people, perhaps in the same place where we live. The difference between her and others is that she is aware of it: there is no difference! Maybe she is the only one who knows this!

Waiters’ competition at Heroes’ Square in the late thirties. Dressed as waiters, Kapa and Pepe awake in the bronze chariot of the millennial sculpture group. They drive along the Danube promenade, and on the concrete reinforcement of the demolished Budapest rondella hotel they get involved in a showdown of political background. In the burnt-down Sports Hall the waiters train for a last supper, Pepe and Kapa run around the big laid table with trays in their hands. While doing so, Pepe keeps crying out: "I am the best one, I am the most beautiful one, I am the king, I am the god..." Sitting in a boat on the Danube, a ship goes past them, and the Niagara falls, majestic and breathtaking, resound in their ears. On each passing away something new will come to life – as rapped by Sub Bass Monster.

In the Kerepesi Street cemetery, three grave diggers contemplate the fate of the world, then they step out of this role and in a sequence of episodes they play the typical figures of contemporary Hungarian reality, the fat cat, the swashbuckler, the victim, underworld chieftains, and present little absurd dramas of love, marriage, friendship, public order and legal safety. The author and the film director walk among them all the time, contemplating, laughing at their plays. The stories starting from the graveyard and returning there warn of the inevitability of death. The author and the director (Gyula Hernádi and Miklós Jancsó) wisely make friends with death.

This time, Kapa and Pepe are first of all prisoners of war – and convicts taken to forced labor service, Jews, Hungarian soldiers, German soldiers. Once they are to be executed, then again they are to perform executions. The film tells in spectacular episodes about the fact that in the past more than one century and a half we kept marching from war to war; occupation and liberation turned out to be indifferent, and why couldn’t the Jews execute the SS-guys? Our heroes hover about dilapidated barracks, then again on the bridges of the capital they guess whose satellites or eternal friends for all times we might be just now. In the cupboard, among the preserved fruit bottles, Stalin is still hiding. The authors of the film are cited before court, then in a showcase hospital they are waiting for the end to come. A Soviet soldier-maid closes the film with a Péter Nádas-quote.

By the notes of Fiáth Pompeiusz, the one-time friend of Kapa and Pepe, Professor Szirtes has solved the secret of the time machine, and he realizes the invention relying on "special" H2O. Kapa and Pepe shall return by it into the past in order to set time right, which is out of joint, that is, to correct history, to save King Louis II, and prevent the Mohács Disaster. Pepe yields to the not too tender persuasion to enter upon the great journey through time, dies and revives, and they arrive at the battlefield of Mohács in time. Kapa films the events. The Turks win and cut off the king’s, Pepe’s, head, still the Hungarians dictate the peace treaty. Kapa and Pepe want to return, they fill the time machine up with water from the well, yet it won’t start. Even so Kapa and Pepe hover over Budapest and quarrel.

Kapa, Pepe and Mesi would like to buy a scrapyard of trains, to start a nostalgia train and earn a lot of money. The capital to start with they want to get from grandpa, who has come home from America with a suitcase full of money. Everybody wants Mesi to approach the old man, because she is the only one he would speak to. But Mesi is more concerned with the idea that she wants a child, by now from anyone, while Pepe is jealous. Kapa’s alleged son emerges, with the mafia behind him: they, too, are eager to get grandpa’s money. After threats and blackmailing, poisoned apples are sent, with only one side of them poisonous. Those dead, by the way, are resurrected by the sound of a song. At last, nobody manages to get the money, but it wouldn’t make sense anyway: it’s all fake. The Statue of Liberty, however, turns out to be blind.

The renowned anarchist teacher Count Ervin Batthyány reappears 100 years after his death. He tries to put his theories into practice again, as he realises that the world has not turned out as he had expected. He founds a new free school with the help of some like-minded people, and starts teaching a new generation who believe in solidarity and cooperation, rather than a system of oppression. But the ideal of freedom and equality awakens the same fears in the choreographers of power as it did 100 years ago. And after an encouraging start the count and his new friends come up against more and more obstacles.

Ildiko runs a campsite, close to nature, far from the hustles and bustles of the capital. Ildiko is excited to learn that her former teacher from secondary school will pay them a visit. Ildiko gladly becomes nostalgic about the school years spent with Vera as her teacher, but mostly because of Vera's care for the students who needed her support. Coinciding with Vera's visit, Ildiko's daughter returns home with her openly gay friends from a demonstration in Budapest. Vera notices their rainbow flag and cannot keep what she really thinks to herself.

As part of the Temps d'Images festival, TRAFÓ Budapest produced 'bildtheatre' performances titled RECYCLEd, experimenting with the relationship between theatre and film, exploring the analogies of recycling, which in this context refers to any cyclically repeated notion. The dramaturgies of the productions were shaped by themes, according to which their far-fetched ideas were transformed and thus became open to further use, i.e., symbioses formed between them when they were recycled. These fictional etudes by Pater Sparrow were short sensations based on dialogues, represented by strange characters, in some shifted spaces and times and in surreal settings, teeming with visual allegories and codes.

Nadia keeps dying and reliving her 36th birthday party. She's trapped in a surreal time loop -- and staring down the barrel of her own mortality.