A Commonplace Story

1952, Budapest. Kati is thirteen years old when her mother dies. Her father works as a founder at the Miskolc foundry, deprived of his former position of director-engineer. Kati is left alone in their flat, transformed into a place crowded with tenants. That is, not quite: in her imagination her mother is alive again, for she still needs her.

For this austere, clear and sharp telefeature, Judit Elek focused on the last months of Martinovics’ life: his interrogation by the Austrians, the examining Magistrate Schilling in particular, shown as a battle of wits as well as delusions on both sides. Elek had wanted to make this film in the early 1970s, but wasn’t allowed to. When she finally got the chance, the reactions were predictable, as the parallels with recent Hungarian history were simply too obvious for officialdom not to feel anxious. History may not repeat itself, but the variations look eerily similar.

A television documentary about miners: the reality of their work versus how it is made to look and sound in the public sphere.

A documentary chronicling the adolescent years of Elie Wiesel and the history of his sufferings. Eliezer was fifteen when Fascism brutally altered his life forever. Fifty years later, he returns to Sighetu Marmatiei, the town where he was born, to walk the painful road of remembrance - but is it possible to speak of the unspeakable? Or does Auschwitz lie beyond the capacity of any human language - the place where words and stories run out?

This two-part film examines the plight of the working class. In part one, an elderly factory laborer goes to work in his last days before he is forced to retire. He leaves the factory life he has always known and goes home to his wife. In the second part, a young farm boy goes off to an industrial trade school to prepare for the very work the old man left behind. The old man loses his freedom by forced retirement while the young man loses his freedom by becoming a worker faced with a lifetime of factory work.

The first part of Judit Eleks long-term documentary portraits the lives of two girls in a small Hungarian village: Marika and Ilonka. As they grow up, they have to decide between working and learning or marrying at the age of 15 and living up to their parents' expectations.

A look at the present use of several Hungarian castles whose former owners in some cases are still around, but kept out of sight for being relics of a society the new rulers finished off.

In the 19th century Austro-Hungarian Empire, David Hersko, a Jewish shepherd, witnesses the attack of a young girl. His home is burned down and he finds shelter with the family of a Jewish logger. The loggers find the body of a young woman which they bury, going against local laws. They are charged with her murder and it is believed that they killed her as a ritual murder.

A man, a woman, an afternoon, a city, and an unspoken, hopeful desire to find love by way of the personal ads. A milestone of Hungarian cinema, Elek uses documentary techniques in a fiction context to make the frailty of everyday life as palpable as possible.

An orphan girl suffers abuse from her adoptive parents.

Persuaded by the janitor's wife, a lively, but lonesome old woman, who is only attached to the world through her cherished objects and memories, decides to exchange her two-room apartment for a smaller one. For a little while her everyday life is changed. She meets and entertains new people every day.

In 1866, the Szendrey family gathers for the name-day of Júlia’s sister, Mária, but the event dissolves into bitter grievances and the physical decline of the household. As the dying widow of the poet Sándor Petőfi, Júlia struggles with a failed second marriage while Mária grapples with jealousy over her own husband’s love for Júlia. The family’s fragile unity finally shatters under the suffocating weight of Sándor’s heroic legacy and the pervasive shadow of illnesses.

A couple in love, but sadly married to other partners. What is to be done? A diagnosis of a comfortable but profoundly incapable society, a Hungary suffering from an endemic private life disorder, observable both among the urban middle and the rural lower classes. A descent into a relationship’s demise, more from the tired inertia of a country that has lost all direction and sense of purpose than any ill will.

Tiszta lap is a 2002 hungarian movie.

Katherine, who survived the Holocaust at age seven, visits her fatherland of Transylvania, Romania for the first time departing from Sweden with her family. Not only do both happy and frightful memories of her forgotten past come to life, but she must also face the depressing reality of Ceausescu's communist dictatorship and the romance developing between her husband and her sister. Parallel to her story and simultaneously, we get to know her childhood love and friend Sandor, who serves the dictator as a forester and whose story has a tragic ending. The film ends with the surprising and odd encounter of the two stories.

Erno Fisch, the film's protagonist, was born in 1903 in Sighet, the same small town as his world-famous compatriot, Elie Wiesel. Erno Fisch was the only Jew in his town that survived the Holocaust. He escaped deportation by hiding in the forest for six months. From his memories, we find out about everyday life in the area, which later became a part of Romania. Erno Fisch lived in an era when being Jewish did not mean being different, and when he could go to a Catholic school, just because it was closer. His life-story exemplifies the fact that resignation is not the only answer to the challenges of life and history.