Zoltán Varga

The Christmas of 1944. The Pásztor family (father, mother, four daughters and a grandchild), are spending the holidays at their country farm. Péter, mothers apple of the eye, soon arrives, and has no objections when his soldiers uniform is made to disappear during the night. The Soviet army, arriving in the footsteps of the fleeing Hungarian army, is commandeering. At night, the soldiers turn up at the house where young women are abiding.

Ede (Dezso Garas) is in his sixties, and he is full of uncertainty about how he and his wife Kati (Mari Torocsik) will fare in the new post-communist regime in Hungary. At least before, he had some idea what he needed to do to get by, and even if he never made much money with his myriad schemes, they got by. Kati has got a real bug in her ear about their livelihood, and is hounding him to get into the spirit of the new system. This is troubling enough for the old gent, but when he runs into an old mistress (Kati Lazar) and discovers that he has a grown son he has never met or knew about, his life becomes even more confusing. His slimy ex big-shot brother-in-law (Istvan Avar) is a major player in the new entrepeneurial risk-taking, and he beseiges poor Ede with advice as well. In this topical comedy, all these worrisome things, and more, come to a head at a big family celebrtion.

The film takes place in a present-day small Hungarian village in the middle of nowhere. Strangers hardly ever come to this place, everything outside of it seems to be in another world for the inhabitants. But one day everything changes, when a stranger from Budapest enters the pub. He is on his way to a vacation in Portugal and wants to spend some days in this village. He soon starts a love affair with the pub owner's daughter. The ex-policeman of the village doesn't like this at all...

Few writers today tackle sweeping, multigenerational family sagas, work that demands vast life experience and insight. József Attila Prize–winner Árpád Thiery has done just that: his two published volumes of the Freytág Siblings’ story (1943 through the late 1960s) have been adapted by Hungarian Television into a five-part series slated for January 1989, and he’s already completed the trilogy’s final installment. Thiery describes it as a historical family novel, tracing postwar Hungary, from the Stalinist 1950s and the 1956 uprising’s aftermath to the upheavals of 1968, while celebrating freedom, truth, hope, boundless faith and innocent responsibility.

1944. At the end of the war ensign Bojtár gets from the captivity of the partisans into that of the Hungarian Nazi and he escapes at the price of a quasi-murder. He has to hide, the more so because his victim did not die and searches for him.

The corrupt leaders of a small rural town learn that an auditor is coming from St Petersburg. Frightened, they try to put things in order. Hlesztakov, a Petersburg official, has been starving for days in his inn in the small town, having gambled away all his money and no credit. In a misunderstanding and a bit of backstabbing, the town's corrupt leaders mistake him for an auditor. The bureau chiefs are watching his every move, and the mayor's daughter is a hit. When he leaves, the whole town celebrates and expects him back for a wedding. But a letter reveals the fraud, and at the same time the real auditor arrives.

A disowned son of a Greek aristocrat arrives in Hungary in 1949 over his family’s communist beliefs and starts work in the Lágymányos tobacco factory, where he falls for Gizi Weiss and fathers their first child in 1953. Fifty years later, the now-destitute “Ratkó baby” is whisked from the Baross Square underpass to Crete by a legion of lawyers to claim his share of a legendary inheritance.

It is a tragedy, set among low-lifes on the outskirts of Budapest. Dramatic Exchange describes it as "Widely considered to be the most important Hungarian play of the last 20 years". The odd title of the play refers in the first instance to the chicken heads that an old woman feeds to her cat. However, it can also be taken to refer more broadly to the obtuse behaviour of the main characters in the play. The play is an odd mixture of pathos and nihilism, written against the bleak background of Stalinist totalitarianism from which Hungary was emerging. As with much modern drama, there is no hero in the play. The only noble behaviour that one can find belongs to one of the characters in the past, when he was a child, but he is no longer as he was. The hint that what once existed might be achieved again is the only faint ray of hope in a very bleak view of the human condition.