If I Were Grown-up

A traditional Hungarian poetic fairytale that describes the epic adventures of a young shepherd through love, war, magic and death.

Set in the allegorical space of an abandoned room, a frustrated mind feels the distorting effects of aggression and paranoia—including visions of butterflies, the Mona Lisa, and nuclear fallout.

A surrealist satire describing the power that is used to dehumanise and deny individual liberties in the name of order and the common good.

A little girl fidgets by the desk at which her father is working. Suddenly she appears on top of the table, where she shrinks to only a few centimetres in size. The scene launches into a series of surrealistic objects of her environment. She is comforted with many situations that could conceivably happen to her in the future, and they prove to be more threatening than reassuring. At the end of film we find Esther restored to her normal self again, sitting on the lap of her father.

A mother's constant grumbling about her daughter-in-law's dish poisons her son's marriage bit by bit.

Arriving for the school celebration, parents go to extreme lengths to iron out all the wrinkles from their boisterous children. They find they are helped in this by the rigidly strict dance teacher. The domineering commands of the lumbering teacher who cannot bear clatter of any sort and the hammering bars of the piano deconstruct the children and uniformize them in accordance with the ideal of adults: first they turn into oafish garden gnomes, then motionless mushrooms, graceful swans, and finally bounding deer.

The Horthy regime marching into the idyll of childhood with peculiar religious processions, Second World War air-raid sirens tearing adolescence to shreds, socialism propped on the shoulders of Stakhanovists in the shadow of Rákosi banners, and the experience of the ‘most cheerful barrack’ of goulash communism within strict confines: this is the collective fate of generation N.