Sándor Kardos

In memory of Janos Toth.

The first woman rabbi in the world, Regina Jonas, comes to light, courtesy of Rachel Weisz – who plays her – and her father George Weisz, who was the executive producer for this poetic and beautiful documentary. The daughter of an Orthodox Jewish peddler, Jonas was ordained in Berlin in 1935. During the Nazi era and the war, her sermons and her unparalleled devotion brought encouragement to the persecuted German Jews. Regina Jonas was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. The only surviving photo of Jonas serves as a leitmotif for the film, showing a determined young woman gazing at the camera with self-confidence.

A boy's secret trek from his country town to Budapest to claim a prize evolves into the hopeful search for his missing father. Lali, a Roma boy, wins a chocolate bar from a friend in a card game and discovers that the wrapper makes him the lucky winner of a red motor scooter. How to claim the prize in person, as required, when you're only twelve and look much younger? First-time director Groó creates a sure and realistic depiction of childhood on the cusp of manhood in this sensitive and lovingly crafted coming-of-age story.

Ever since I started making films it has bothered me in a certain sense that film images are far too concrete, because technically they try to imitate the sense of space characteristic of everyday life. So the story ignites the imagination only to be slowed down by the images and stops the viewer from taking a flight of fantasy. I have always been searching for an intrinsically different tool in filmmaking. One that could record space in its temporal progression. I would never have thought it existed!

Japanese guy meditating on stuff.

Japanese guy meditating on stuff.

Japanese guy meditating on stuff.

The tumultuous history of Hungary through the twentieth century is viewed through the saga of the Hungarian-Jewish, furniture-manufacturing family, the Vendels. After taking over the once successful, but now failing, family business in the 1930s, the family patriarch's dashing elder son decides that the family needs an infusion of new blood. A matchmaker presents him with a photo of a pretty German nursery school teacher. When the two meet, they instantly fall in love, but because Hungary has an alliance with Germany, and the Third Reich prohibits marriage between Gentiles and Jews, the couple must hide their union. Their marriage ultimately stands as a dark foreshadowing of rougher times to come as troubles ensue with the advent of World War II, when the family, its employees and servants must retreat to the basement, where the shop emerges increasingly as a refuge in a world growing more violent and less tolerant.

The film is a modernised version of the Chekhov drama, put in Budapest, Hungary, in a Soviet barracks between 1987 and 1991.

Defoe, lacking fantasy of his own takes home the drunkard sailor from the pub and lets him tell his stories on the uninhabited island.

In the small village of Rátót, every male is called Béla. When a woman gives birth to her child, she names him Józsi...

A deep drama about life in Hungary after the WW2 until the revolt against Russians in '56. The main character is the head of the black market in Budapest. He thinks he can buy everyone and everything but at the end he must face that he can't buy life. A must-see for everyone. Casting involves some of the greatest Hungarian actors. The story takes place in the eighth district of Budapest focusing on the market place on Teleki square which is still working. The movie contains some archive footage of real fight during the revolution.

Accidentally, as if they had secretly intended to do so, Jonas and Maria meet. They go on a trip together and try to find out what sense there is in living and the road to freedom. Just as accidentally, an unknown man is trailed, hindered and kidnapped. Finally, he fights back and becomes the victim of his own doing. Accident? Fate? Necessity?...

Documentary short about Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944).

In the box factory standing in the middle of nowhere only women work, and they themselves only waste their time, as the unmarketable boxes pile up in the yards. The fireman in duty, who stores stolen gasoline in the inflammable plant, sets up cameras in the women's locker room the sake of 'business'.

The Annunciation (in Hungarian: Angyali üdvözlet) is a Hungarian film directed by András Jeles in 1984, based on The Tragedy of Man (1861) by Imre Madách. When Adam (Péter Bocsor) and Eve (Júlia Mérő), having succumbed to Lucifer's temptation, are cast out of the Garden of Eden, Adam holds Lucifer (Eszter Gyalog) to his promise, reminding him that "You said I would know everything!". So Lucifer grants Adam a dream of the world to come. And what a bizarre dream: Adam becomes Miltiades in Athens; a knight called Tancred in Byzantium; Kepler in Prague; Danton in revolutionary Paris; and a nameless suitor in Victorian London. Guided by a deceptively sweet but ultimately contemptuous Lucifer, Adam confronts an endless procession of the horror of the human story... rapists and concubines, betrayal and savagery, mindless cruelty and fanaticism.

In this dense setting, the inhabitants of a large, claustrophobic apartment reveal their darkest secrets, fears, obsessions and hostilities.

The twenty-year-old young man Sz. László is a lorry guard employed by an agricultural co-operative located in the vicinity of the capital. One day he neither posts the money officially entrusted to him nor goes to work, spending time and money as he likes on things he otherwise cannot afford, such as hanging around, sweets, driving in taxis, restaurants, Lake Balaton, girls, etc.