The Émigré: Everything is Different

The documentary-feature film, featuring amateur players and showing the life of three sisters in its simple dull flow of events, has grown to be the symbol of the Budapest School. The Kertész-girls live in a little apartment in a block of flats in Budapest with their parents. At the beginning of the film, each talks about her dream-future. They would like to have glass-walled rooms, well-to-do husbands, apartments in the greens, dogs, travelling, smiling children, social life.

The two main locations of the film are Venice and New York - it is these two settings in which the protagonist, an astrologist, is slowly dying. He is a victim of the Chernobyl catastrophe.

Via the New York Times: "...the film has the free form of the agitprop movies made by Jean-Luc Godard in the late 1960's and early 1970's. At the center of it is the small fictional tale of Raffael, who stands for everything rotten in the newly liberalized Hungarian society. He is the owner of an amazingly profitable video shop in Budapast and, it seems, a speculator in currencies."

The film is a documentary-feature film based on real stories and made with amateur actors. The district pioneer secretary is assigned to find a pioneer who can play a musical instrument, has a working-class background, and studies well at school and appoint him for a one-month-long premium holiday in Britain. He finds a guitarist, Balogh Tibi, in a village school.

1991, farewell in Budapest. Mária remembers the past in tears. Her husband, Tibor, a chemist and a target of the KGB, left their apartment one evening to fetch some cigarettes only to be found drowned in the shallow Lake Balaton the following day. Their son, Peter, a student in Western-Europe, was found dead on the Danube embankment.

Hungarian documentary mini-series.

A five part docu-drama following the everyday lives, family conflicts, careers, joys and problems of a married couple of school teachers and their five children.