The trainer, the social worker, the writer, the comedian, the running race organizer. They all went through childhood traumas yet became excellent adults. What are their secrets? They talk to psychologists about how they can be a “normal” parents after a difficult childhood. The 3 reporters: Fruzsina Skrabski, Borbála Szabó and Balázs Bodacz presents their stories. Csaba Böjte, who raised successful adults out of thousands of orphaned children, is also involved. Finally, we also get to know their family members, who introduce them during a game and tell us why and how they became good mothers, fathers, husbands, wives.
Who and why did put a bullet through the heads of Hungarian and German infants and children, in addition to exterminating whole families in the near of Přerov (Prerau), Moravia on June 18th 1945? For what reason were the bodies of murdered women and children cremated in the crematory of Olomouc (Olmütz), Moravia, after being disinterred by army units two years after the mass massacre? Why did the Czech historian who had detected the fate of massacred Hungarian and German families not get any appreciation or honor from Budapest? And what happened to those 90 Hungarian soldiers (levente) who were handed over to Slovak army soldiers by Soviet forces occupying Austria?
A young Hungarian hunter faces the most difficult situation of his life, he has to choose his new partner in hunting: a Hungarian pointer puppy. The two hunters become partners just before our eyes meanwhile we get to know the story of the Hungarian pointers, how they are selected, trained and hunt. We get to know the process of hunting and the competition of hunting dogs in a wonderful natural environment. We witness to hunters evolving partnership in the beautiful documentary.
Where does the hate which divides our country originate from? How did the still lasting antagonism start? To what extent was Communist Secret Service responsible for the division, during the change of the regime? What games did they orchestrate from the background during the 1990s and the 2000s? Gergely Huth’s documentary is seeking the answers to these questions, asking key players of the changment of the regime. One time friends and allies are speaking of the unity of the past, which was so dangerous for the Communist Party and which was ultimately so easy to break.
Secret documents, spectacular animation inserts, unique footages, an agent confronting his past, a researcher turned counter-espionage officer, memories completing each other into a large picture- these fragments make-up the film, which isn’t preaching, only trying to make viewers think. How did we get here? Why did we let this happen? To what extent was „ÉK”, the Secret Service’s controverisal action succesful?
The documentary introduces the families of three Hungarian victims and aims to present through their stories how Subcarpathians were affected by the East-Ukrainian war. In the East-Ukrainian region, bloody battles started between the Ukrainian army and Russian separatists in the spring of 2014. Several thousands died and hundreds of thousands had to leave their homes. Several hundred Subcarpathia-based Hungarian soldiers took part in the fight, and nearly a dozen of them died.
The film sheds light on how the soldiers had been drafted into the army, how they maintained contact with their relatives, what they had to lack and what were their last messages to their loved ones. Two mothers and a wife stir the memory of the moment when they came to know that their sons and husband had been killed in Donetsk and Luhansk.
Hungarian and Ukrainian soldiers tell us about their front experiences and grievous traumas.
The film crew went along the locations of the front where the heaviest battles took place and the Hungarian victims died. A humanitarian aid agency is continuously searching for the dead because thousands of unburied bodies are still lying on the battleground.
Shocking sequences give insight into how the residents of the homeland take the funereal procession held for the heroes of the war.
Hungarian and Russian historicists, as well as Ukrainian interviewees analyze the causes of the conflict and try to give answer to the question, what the future can bring.
Noemi Katona, a 28 years old student, living in Berlin for four years and made history, sociology, cultural anthropology study, next to the human rights of prostitutes working in a civil protection organization. She found her grandfather’s diary from 1945 in the Second World War after her grandfather died in 2008. The journal was about a soldier’s life of the Hungarian army between December 1944 and October 1945, day after day. It was about the American and the French captivity reality, the humiliation and comradeship, faith, struggle for surviving. Noemi started to pass over between the Hungarian village Mihályfa and German Bad Kreuznach, Bretsenheim by his grandfather’s diary with a small camcorder trying to understand a generation, a historical situation and in particular her grandfather’s thinking. Meanwhile, we also follow her with a camera and we present the life and thoughts which were described in the journal. Contemporary archival images also evoke the past. After arriving home, Hungary, Noemi has also researched about the western captivity: why it was not possible to talk about all this after 1945 in Hungary? Why should they hide what they experienced at a young age during all their lifetime? In light of the theme of the Holocaust and the Gulag-events there was speaking about it not too much. We want to present the history of this slice through a personal story, which, like other event and policy of the second World War, decided the fate of hundreds of thousand innocent Hungarian soldiers in the XXst century in Hungary.
Glorious or shameful, the Hungarian historiography has not been stingy with adjectives when it was about the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Through the past seventy years it was all negative or all positive about the 133 days of the Republic.
The events that took place in 1919, parallel to the disruption of Hungary, since then have greatly influenced our history. Even though the Hungarian Soviet Republic only lasted for 133 days, it became an indelible part of the Hungarian historiography. Manipulated school materials, deficient historical reports, films and books have been produced. In 1989 it became subsidiary to clarify what happened 70 years before. Now we aim to present not just the story of those 133 days, but also the presentation of the Hungarian Soviet Republic during the last decades, with other words the falsification of history. It is important to clarify what happened between the 21st of March and the 1st of August in 1919.
There are more and more programs that are launched to acquaint city people the farmer lifestyle and agriculture. In the Countryside Adventure programme youngsters from big cities spend a week at a farm, where they have to work on the fields and deal with animals. But what happens if one of them decides to become a real farmer? Does he have any chance to launch his own business?
What does the Hungarian pig know that it’s so adored in the Netherlands, Spain, Japan and the United States? Is it really a wild pig? Why is the lard good? Everything about the mangalitsa pig in one film.
If you can’t beat them, destroy their reputation, turn their comrades against them – that is how we could sum up the method of discredit and divide frequently applied by Hungarian State Security Service. It was used from 1957 up until the change of the regime – and even afterwards… The Party’s secret services not only observed and intimidated the system’s external and internal enemies, but undercover agents made up absurd accusations against them. Gergely Huth and András Kerekes’ documentary outlines the method of denigration through the example of Sándor Szalai, a charismatic oppositional professor, and the story of the Inconnu art group. The documentary draws attention to the fact that it is not coincidental that by the time of the regime change the opposition had to face thousands of breaklines. Their method worked successfuly. The stories are based on the researches of the Hamvas Béla Cultural Research Institute. Fictional scenes make the film even more exciting.
A doku-reality about dating. Three boys and three girls, six sad to be singles met strangers on camera, discussed their problems, and confronted their shortcomings.
At a time when surveys show that Hungarians want twice as many children, fewer and fewer are born in the country every year. On the other hand there are more and more singles, who can’t find a partner for long-term. We tried to examine this phenomenon through the examples of six youngsters. We accompanied them to the first meeting at a nightclub in Budapest, we made them perform improvisational excercises, discussed relationships in a teahouse and finally analyzed their behavior with the help of an expert team. A pszichologist, Dr. Almássi Kitti, the leador of the Three Princes Three Princesses Movement, Székely András and a famous Tv presenter, successful husband and father, Gundel Takács Gábor sat in this team. We examined all the occasions from the point of longterm relationships, because all the participatns have the same goal: getting married and starting a family.
This film is an entertaining way of drawing attention to a significant social problem of nowadays.
Béla Biszku was a leading figure in the purges that took place throughout Hungary after the fall of the 1956 Revolution. As acting minister of the interior, he led the bloody liquidation of those who had raised their voices against the oppressive Soviet regime on the streets of Budapest in 1956. Following the political changes in Hungary, Béla Biszku went on to live in secluded secrecy, and spoke to no one about his involvement in these atrocities. Our intrepid reporters donned disguises and rang the bell of the once famously feared minister.
An elderly lifeguard gets his medical diagnosis. He has to indulgence himself from any sport activity. This would not be a problem, if our lifeguard wouldn’t be an enthousiastic swimmer coach and ex olimpic champion, who is racing with his younger self from night to night, not beeing able to make peace with himself. A melancholic memento about a lifeguard who’s arch enemy is time, in terms of his neglected marriage or the missing of his own life. Our movie examines the down of a succesful man’s life. Is a winner really a winner?
Sadly, it appears that rape has become an established part of war, perhaps the most brutal exponents of which were the Soviet troops who occupied Hungary in 1945. Extensive research into records from STD clinics shows that hundreds of thousands of Hungarian women were raped during this period. The severity of the situation is also highlighted by the fact that abortion was made legal shortly after the Soviet occupation.
It proved particularly challenging to make a film on this subject as although many people know about the atrocities committed by Soviet soldiers, very few people are willing to talk openly about what actually happened. Victims were extremely reluctant to talk about what had happened to them and often kept it a secret from their families.
Our film crew retraced the tracks of the Red Army across Hungary and questioned eyewitness, relatives and victims about their treatment under Soviet military occupation. All the stories began much in the same manner: innocent civilians hid from the soldiers in cellars and attics, and the girls made themselves ugly, filthy and smelly to deliberately discourage advances from Soviet troops. But then drunken soldiers appeared at the door and dragged women away leaving them severely mentally or physically damaged by the violence and brutality of their attacks in an atmosphere of shame and accusation.
We spoke to Soviet veterans, historians, psychologists and victims, and tried to discover what it was that made men act in such a cruel and unforgivable manner. What did years of combat, killing and alcohol do to a man?
Rape does not cause sexual pleasure but is an act of extreme violence and control perpetrated against unarmed and vulnerable women. The added bitter irony of the situation is that the victorious army remained in Hungary for a further 40 years and, along with the Hungarian Communists, were celebrated as the nation’s liberators. This then meant that victims were forced to conceal the truth about events to avoid punishment and discrimination by the ruling regime.
The film also highlights the fact that there are still those in Hungary who celebrate an army that invaded a nation and raped its womenfolk. The victims have never received compensation and documentation has never been released from Russian military archives presumably because those responsible for such acts of acute brutality could still be brought before a court of law.
This film is based on the writer and director’s personal grief. Fruzsina Skrabski started to make the film after her father died and sadly also lost her mother while the film was being made. The questions she asks are the ones everybody has. We all want to know what happens before life and after death but we only ever give these questions any serious thought when we or someone we love has an encounter with death.
When does life begin? From what point does a person possess a soul? Does such a thing as the soul actually exist?
Is abortion equivalent to murder? What happens after a person dies? Heaven? Reincarnation? Nothing?
The director examines these questions with the help of a Catholic priest and a Buddhist monk, a materialist, a gynaecologist, a test-tube baby, a researcher studying near-death experiences, a incurably ill patient and anyone who she thinks might be able to supply her with an answer.
She then places these people in front of one another. She provokes the Catholic priest to tell the test-tube baby (now a medical student) that he should never have born in the first place. She asks the materialist what the term “soul” means to him and how he would deal with the death of someone close to him. She visits a mortuary and tries to find signs to show when and how the soul leaves the body. A dying woman is interviewed who speaks about what she expects from death who sadly died shortly after filming was completed.
The film endeavours to remain neutral and provide viewers with the freedom to decide which view they consider closest to their own.
The aim of the piece is to provoke the younger generation and provide help to those expecting a baby or dealing with loss who are keen to find out as much as they can about the mystery that surrounds the division between life and death.
For most Hungarian people the word “Balaton” means a joyful holiday. For the inhabitants around the lake it is more about the workers’ everyday life. And for the ones, who are working on the water, it is life itself. Nowadays there are less and less fisherman working on the waves of the Balaton. The generation, whose livelihood depended on the good catch has already passed by. Most of the fishing on the lake Balaton is done by one big company, but it hasn’t always been like that. Just as by the shore of the seas, the side of the Balaton used to be a paradise for fishermen for hundreds of years.
The 52-minutes documentary is based on the life of a fisherman living on the lake, a day of an angler sitting on the side of the water – waiting for the great catch, whether it comes or not. During the documentary the viewer is able to get to know to the main characters in the industry, the committed enthusiasts of fishing. The owner of the fish restaurant, who helps understanding the question of the hake. The angler, who wants the lake to only be available for sportsmen not for fishermen. The police officer, who fights against the poachers since decades. What were the ice stores used for? Why is the bighead carp is a danger to the native species of the Balaton?
This film shows that the lake Balaton is a lot more, than our child- or adulthoods’ favorite resting place. It is a workplace, which used to be a livelihood for many in the past centuries.
The film starts with the meeting of two hands. They fall in love and the union of the two gives life of a little one. The tiny hand grabs the parent’s finger, discovers his own motions. He holds objects and gains knowledge. Improves. Starts to eat and drink independently, creates his first drawings. Then he finds friends, starts the school and the little child grows up to be a boy. We show the adolescence’s first successes and failures, while we place the emphasis still on the hands. Like in the life of a youngster, music, party and love appears in the movie. Adulthood starts and the love of his life becomes marriage. The easy and droll years are replaced by the years of parenthood, until they finally become grandparents. Years go by and the hardworking hands turn motionless.
The experimental short film portrays the life from the perspective of a hand. We see the happy moments and the conflicts of daily life. The touching movie tries to draw attention to the importance and beauty of the small, everyday events in life, supposed to be insignificants.
The documentary is about a shocking crime that happened 6 years ago in a suburbian secondary school in Budapest. Two teachers were killed on 7th january 2009. What makes the case special is the recorded audio of the murder. It’s unique in European crime history.
The documentary is based on the news, court evidence, archives from the trial and the recorded audio. In addition the crime scene is reconstructed using fiction film elements and actors. The film follows the crime moment by moment and presents the lives of the victims and the murderers.
The key scenes were shot on the original crime scene at the school in Csepel. There are several reports in the film. Friends, relatives, colleagues and criminal experts try to find answer for the question how could this tragedy happen that nobody had predicted.
