Mária Nagy

"Once upon a time there was an old gypsy. He had never left the hill where he lived. He never went to the inn, nor read the newspaper or watched Dallas. He was a proud man who liked to tell stories. Even though he avoided the church, he knew what the fear of God was. The old gypsy was blessed by three beautiful daughters whom he loved more than anything else. The two older ones soon found husbands, but the youngest Sarolta only walked up hill and down dale. She was the apple of his eye..." This is the beginning of Romani Kris. The film shows the gypsy Lovér and the village idiot Tamáska on their dramatic and adventurous journey through a Hungarian landscape at times lush and at times barren to present a lyrical, magical and unforgettable story.

1991, farewell in Budapest. Mária remembers the past in tears. Her husband, Tibor, a chemist and a target of the KGB, left their apartment one evening to fetch some cigarettes only to be found drowned in the shallow Lake Balaton the following day. Their son, Peter, a student in Western-Europe, was found dead on the Danube embankment.

The film was shot in 1989 by Lívia Gyarmathy and Géza Böszörményi about a judge who had had a successful career back in the '50s. He resigned from his position as home secretary on 12th December 1956 and chose to do physical work for a while. However, in the period before his resignation he had sentenced many to die, and not just ones he believed were guilty. The confessions of the judge show a fragment of the psychology of tyranny.

This European Film Award winner documentary tells the story of Recsk, Hungary's most notorious political prison camp, which operated between 1950 and 1953. During the early 1950's the very existence of this camp for political prisoners at Recsk was one of the Hungarian communist regime's deepest secrets. Hundreds of people were taken there without ever actually being sentenced by any court, and had to suffer through the brutal treatment handed down by their sadistic captors. This documentary tells the story of Recsk from both the captors' and the prisoners' point of view, capturing the atmosphere of paranoia, humiliation and degradation that prevailed throughout the Stalinist gulag system.

National problems between the bride of Swabian origin and the bridegroom from Székelys of Bucovina burst out in the marriage, but the film also shows the possibility for reconciliation.

A Budapest high school in the beginning of the 1960s. Dini suffers the torments of adolescence. His father had to leave Hungary after the uprise in 1956, and since then Dini's mother has had to take care of her two sons on her own. A friend of Dini’s father, Bodor, is released from prison and moves in with them. Dini and his brother are far from happy about this intrusion on their family life.

Irén and Attila, a not-so-young couple, are in love. All they want is a flat of their own where they could live together. Unfortunately, Hungary in the 70s is no place for dreams.