Ferenc Schöffer

The horrors of war are examined from the view points of lifelong friends (Linus Roache, Vincent Perez), who end up on opposing sides in the civil war in Sarajevo. One is an expert marksman, who trains the snipers used to terrify the city and the other becomes a freedom fighter, who rejects his friend's offer to gain an escape from the city. As might be expected, the two eventually have to face-off against one another.

An atmospheric, sub-hallucinogenic venture into the world of the unknown. The enigma facing a young woman is the identity of her father. Unfortunately for her, she becomes drawn into a small Romanian underworld of brooding menace, darkness, torture chambers, and bizarrely over make-over'ed vampires. The moody undertones and well chosen locations are certainly a bonus, as is the comically funny finale.

Janos and Kata are thrown together during the Second World War and forced to pose as husband and wife to hide from the Nazis. The intensity and suffocating intimacy of their new relationship and the circumstances in which they find themselves, forces them to confront past prejudices and assumptions and challenge what they truly believe.

Winter of 1944, the last days of the war. When the roads and houses ceased to exist and the bottom of the cellars become filled with life, when fortunes were lost and countries burned up, her used coat was only important to Mama, the cloak-room servant of a local dance-school. Her son stole it to sell it for twenty pengő. He did it because Aranka Fussbaum's love cost money. There is no honour left in such a destroyed world. Yet still they start looking for that coat... (Elemér Ragályi won Best camera with this movie in Montreal, 1979, and in Budapest, 1980.)

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.

Village-girl (Juli Kovács) arrives in the city to work in a factory. The works manager (János Bodnár) sets his eye on her, but at first the girl refuses his advance.

Baradla Géza, war criminal, returns after 25 years, with his ex-accomplice, Obrád Simon, to the village where he burned houses with people inside and executed partisans. The ex squad-leader is chased to this place by his "heroic deed" and the memory of his love. Like a maniac, he wants to forgive the village residents for having killed six of his soldiers.

This Hungarian film chronicles the slow deterioration in the life of Juli, a farmer's wife. As the countryside grows ever more deserted because people are moving to towns or large collective farms, she spends more and more time alone. Despite her best efforts to appreciate her situation, her despair grows. The loneliness is briefly interrupted when she and her husband take in an old woman and care for her, but the woman dies. Shortly after her son visits, she is killed in an accident which may have been a suicide. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi