István Gaál

Dead Landscape

This Hungarian film chronicles the slow deterioration in the life of Juli, a farmer's wife. As the countryside grows ever more deserted because people are moving to towns or large collective farms, she spends more and more time alone. Despite her best efforts to appreciate her situation, her despair grows. The loneliness is briefly interrupted when she and her husband take in an old woman and care for her, but the woman dies. Shortly after her son visits, she is killed in an accident which may have been a suicide. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

Éjszaka

The characters of the 15th-century Hussite War – the Hussite mercenary, the imperial soldier, the priest, and the peasant – appear in a writer's home, and engage in a debate. The main question of their conversation: who among them is a traitor, and who has a just cause in the conflict. This movie is a television adaptation of Ferenc Sánta's drama of the same name, based on his novel "Az Áruló".

Green Years

The story is set in the stifling atmosphere of the 1950s. The highly politicized everyday life of the period unfolds from the perspective of a young man coming from a poor peasant background who wins entry to the humanities faculty in Budapest. The film shows how politics interferes in and corrodes the private lives of people.

Orpheus and Eurydice

The opera-film, as opposed to Gluck's Vienna version, is a recollection of the ancient tragic Greek myth. Orpheus, who is able to defeat Hades with the power of art, is unable to conquer his own human defects. Amor is sympathetic to Orpheus' sufferings as he mourns his dead beloved, and lets him know the message sent by the Gods, namely that he may take her home from the underworld if he is capable of not looking at her.

Baptism

A 40-year-old sculptor returns home to witness the baptism of his young nephew. His return prompts a series of flashbacks to his youth and the political upheaval experienced by his family and friends.

Potteries

Andras (Zygmunt Malanowicz), an older man employed as a furniture designer, gets a life-jarring shock when he returns from a trip and finds that some of the work he developed has been given over to a younger employee. This instigates a mid-life crisis over his own identity and his sense of security and self-worth, all exacerbated by a recent divorce and estrangement from his son. Recognizing that he needs help, the man goes for therapy and starts to face his problems. Therapy counteracts some of the damage of living, and the man starts to consider his son, his relationships with women, and his father in a different light.

Tisza: Autumn Sketches

The first signs of autumn are seen in a landscape along a river. Some villagers are stacking a bed of stone blocks on the river-bank to avoid more eroding. Others are occupied by ploughing, fishing or repairing. A small steamboat passes by. In the engine room a stoker is shovelling coal into the oven. Further down the river a small town is passed by the water. A rowing-team is training for coming races. Some biologists are looking at microbes from the water through a microscope. A group of workers are painting a new barge and push it into the river. When a small boy sees a racing boat, he leaves his sand-castle and runs along the river.

Peer Gynt

Adapted for Hungarian TV. Dreamy Peer Gynt lives in a small Norwegian village high up in the mountains with his mother, Aase, and his grandfather. Peer Gynt's elderly father and grandfather have squandered everything, but the boy could still make the farm prosper with hard work if he wants to work, not just tell stories and hang around. Peer is living in a dream world, wanting to be king or emperor, running after his impossible visions without thinking. He could make a decent marriage with Ingrid, the daughter of a wealthy farmer, but he just dishonours her and runs away. Solvejg loves her with true love and then goes into the woods to hide, but Peer continues to run away to distant foreign lands...