The Empire Gone With A Sneeze

The story of Bálint Balassi, the poet and warrior. The scene is Hungary at the end of the 16th century. The soldiers stationed at the castles of Hungary's border defence-system spend their days with anti-Turkish raids, hunting and womanising.

Kalán Imre, the district doctor lives in a small village surrounded by mountains. One day he is visited by two young relatives of his and their friend, a doctor at the beginning of his career. The name of the doctor is Király András, and he happens to be the great love of Kalán's young wife from her unmarried years. The orthodox Stalinist Kalán's entire life is filled with his great passion, hunting. The suffocating, narrow lives of the prominent people in the area are slowly revealed to András.

An unsentimental Hungarian film about the edgy relationship between a middle-aged woman and her young, restless daughter-in-law when the son-husband goes to sea for six months.

After the failure of the Kossuth's revolution of 1848, people suspected of supporting the revolution are sent to prison camps. Years later, partisans led by outlaw Sándor Rózsa still run rampant. Although the authorities do not know the identities of the partisans, they round up suspects and try to root them out by any means necessary.

Set during a turbulent era of disquiet, fear, persecution and terror, which permeates every corner of post-WWI Hungarian society. In 1919, after just a few months of communist rule the Hungarian Republic of Councils falls victim to a nationalist counter-revolution. Admiral Horthy, leader of the nationalist far right movement, becomes the self-proclaimed regent of Hungary, and assumes power as the legal Head of State. Soldiers of the short-lived Hungarian Red Army are now on the run from relentless secret policemen and patrol units of the nationalist Royal Gendarme. If caught, ex-Red Army soldiers are executed without mercy or proper trial. István Cserzi, a former soldier of the Red Army has fled to the Great Hungarian Plains and has taken refuge on a farm, which is run by two sympathetic women.

The State Folk Ensemble has performed the dance game more than a thousand times, and it has traveled all over the world. The short film was shot in Ecser, Gyömrő, Dabas and in the capital, in the studio of Magyar Filmgyártó Vállalat.

Lena Kuchler, a Holocaust survivor, searches a Polish refugee camp for lost family members in the months after the war but instead finds 100 starving children with nowhere to go and nobody who wants them. She takes it upon herself to care for them, leading first to an isolated retreat, where they encounter antisemitic violence, and ultimately, to an exodus to Palestine.

Stephen, living in a troubled family, breaks into a grocery store and wreaks vandalism. He is sent to a reform school. Later he works in a cleaning brigade and accidentally meets József Draskóczi, who denounced him. Draskóczi lives in an unloving, troubled atmosphere with his barren daughter and cynical son-in-law, ascetic about his youthful communist beliefs. He feels responsible for Istvan's fate, offering him a human voice and love. Despite his daughter's hysterical jealousy, he sends Istvan to school and then, through his previous connections, provides him with an apartment...

Dery is a grande dame actress of the Sarah Bernhardt school of big-gesture theater. Her beauty and popularity is fading, and a new school of acting which involves the use of one's own emotions (a-la Eleanora Duse) is emerging in the person of her younger Viennese rival. She thinks of retiring from the stage, and reunites briefly with her estranged husband in a newly-built manor in the country. Finding that life there is boring, she returns to town, the theater, and her old friends.

A Roma laborer living in a shantytown strives to organize a traditional, dignified funeral for his wife following her sudden death. He travels to the city to secure the necessary funds and arrangements, navigating various bureaucratic and social obstacles along the way.

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.

Set in the 1890s on the Hungarian plains, a group of farm workers go on strike in which they face harsh reprisals and the reality of revolt, oppression, morality and violence.

Looking for a safe place to live after being harassed by her husband, a depressive and violent man, Juli stays at a women's shelter run by Mária.

Juli, who works in a brick factory, begins a romantic relationship with her boss, to whom she hides the fact that she has a son.

It has been fifteen years since the death of her father, Agamemnon, and Elektra still burns with hatred for Aegisztosz, who conspired with Elektra's mother to kill him.

Savanyú and his friend work at a plant. After the monotonous shifts they engage in the pleasures of the afternoon and the night, i.e. parties and concerts. Savanyú dates Juli, they are already engaged. The young men live as sub-tenants, the young women in workers' hostels. None of these places are suited for spending time together. They are in need of an apartment. Out of the ruinous apartment which they lay siege on, however, they are sent away by the otherwise friendly policeman. At a concert held in the Park of Youth, Juli gets to know Géza. They flirt, then go to the country with a pop-group. Savanyú and his friends follow them. A minor fight cools the atmosphere.