Rear-Guard

Gráci has been recently released from a reformatory school. His old gang would like to involve him in a new action, but he hesitates. His past record is bad enough already, and he would not like to get into new trouble.

The film is a historic parable about the topicality of revolution. 1514. The peasants' uprising is over, Dózsa has been arrested. Werbőczy tries to get the imprisoned peasant leader deny the revolution and offers him the lives of his people in exchange.

Nagy István, the formerly poor peasant boy returns to his native village as a teacher. His conviction is that the abyss between rich and poor can be diminished by good will. The rich Böröcz Horváth Klári returns his love, and also Böröcz Horváth is willing to help the poorest family, the Bakos. Bakos Jóska, who was sent to serve the tough Böröcz Horváth as a payment, dies of an infected wound and the people in the village hold the teacher liable as well. Nagy István realises, that the abyss cannot be ceased, what is more, it is impassable. He breaks up with his fiancée and stands by the side of the poor.

This easy-to-take Hungarian drama is also known as Two Wishes. The prinicipal characters are a pair of juvenile delinquents, who may still be redeemable. The sullen duo is befriended by a kindly police inspector, who takes it upon himself to straighten out the boys. What follows cannot be termed surprsingly or innovative, though it is immensely satisfying. Of interest is the fact that a Communist-bloc film would admit to a delinquency problem in the so-called Worker's Paradise. Ket Vallomas was the Hungarian entry in the 1957 Cannes Film Festival.

On New Year's Eve in 1956 the artist couple, the actor János and the dancer Viki are hastily packing. While they are waiting for the car, which is to take them across the border, their entire life is replayed in front of their eyes.

The "sleepless years" in this propaganda piece by director Felix Marlassy occur on Csepel Island, an island south of Budapest that is home to an armaments factory. The factory workers are shown being exploited by imperialists, capitalists gone berserk, and fascists, more or less in that exact chronological sequence. The heavy-handed approach does much to undercut the belief that when socialism finally takes over, the lives of the workers are brought up to a human level. In this instance, audiences might prefer a more nuanced and subtle statement, no matter what the message.

Miskei, the popular and dynamic president of a co-op falls in love with Mari, the attractive wife of the elderly Pató. The deeply feeling woman is fed up with the service beside the haughty land holder, she is longing for tenderness and a child. The passion of Miskei is growing when he sees how crudely, humiliating Pató treats her. During a powerful summer shower, when chance brings them together in an abandoned press house, he storms on Mari confessing love. The woman refuses him bitterly. Miskei calms down and he keeps on expressing his love and high esteem with the woman by steadfast and tiny compliments. Early one morning Mari leaves her husband and sets off to the city to learn and to begin a new life.

The fate of a Hungarian Jewish family throughout the 20th century.

Sztankó János, the freshly appointed director of a company that builds agricultural factories meets his former classmate, Palócz. Palócz is just released from the prison where he got on made-up charges. Sztankó suddenly decides to employ the engineer since he wants to show up spectacular, quick results.

Jutka, a young woman who works in a factory, falls in love with Andras, a university student. She pretends to be a student, to him and to his parents, and begins to live a lie. Finally she rebels against Andras and his demands and the social conventions that forced her to live a lie.

In 1866, the Szendrey family gathers for the name-day of Júlia’s sister, Mária, but the event dissolves into bitter grievances and the physical decline of the household. As the dying widow of the poet Sándor Petőfi, Júlia struggles with a failed second marriage while Mária grapples with jealousy over her own husband’s love for Júlia. The family’s fragile unity finally shatters under the suffocating weight of Sándor’s heroic legacy and the pervasive shadow of illnesses.

Three stories. Three ages. Three men. Grandfather, father, son. One is an orderly, one is a leading sportsman, and one is a master taxidermist. One desires love, the other success, and the third immortality.

After having lost her parents, young Juli returns from the Soviet Union to her native Budapest. Scarred by the wounds of the past, the ghost of Stalin’s oppression haunts her as she reunites with her aunt and adoptive mother Magda.

Inspired by García Lorca's stage poem, this is the story of a young woman who cannot realize her desire for self-realization either in the confines of her Andalusian village or in her relationship with her traditional husband.

A continuation of "Diary for My Children," the film picks up in 1950, when Juli, the diarist, is 18 and determined to become a movie director.

Few writers today tackle sweeping, multigenerational family sagas, work that demands vast life experience and insight. József Attila Prize–winner Árpád Thiery has done just that: his two published volumes of the Freytág Siblings’ story (1943 through the late 1960s) have been adapted by Hungarian Television into a five-part series slated for January 1989, and he’s already completed the trilogy’s final installment. Thiery describes it as a historical family novel, tracing postwar Hungary, from the Stalinist 1950s and the 1956 uprising’s aftermath to the upheavals of 1968, while celebrating freedom, truth, hope, boundless faith and innocent responsibility.

Tibor Malkáv is an andaverage 37-year-old man, who though not rich, leads a comfortable and uncomplicated life. All this changes when he finds out his mother is dying of cancer and the cost of surgery is well beyond his means. A one-eyed man known as the Cyclops offers Tibor a solution to his financial woes, however, there is a catch and Tibor has to kill someone in return. What follows is a chain reaction that has long-lasting and unexpected results.

The story of a childless Jewish couple in WWII-era Hungary who adopt a Hungarian boy and raise him with their values and traditions.

A focus on the tormented lives of intellectuals who failed to protest recent troubles in their homeland. Jancsó emphasizes highly evocative and ambiguous imagery over dialog or exposition as he – through visually fascinating imagery – depicts the painful, stunted lives of Hungary's intellectuals who have remained silent and ineffectual during various political crises.

A group of landless Hungarian peasants accept work as migrant-labourers on a northern German farm where the wages are good, and the wives and family are allowed to accompany them. Though in the midst of WWII, they are relatively well-off. However, as they witness the treatment accorded to POWs and others not so gently regarded, and at the conclusion of the year's harvest, they choose to return to Hungary and are quickly swept up in the tides of war.

The family travels to Zebegény for their holiday, and the following day the seventeen-year-old Vera also leaves for Lake Balaton to pick peaches in a voluntary camp there. Her boyfriend, Gyuri, goes to a film shooting. Gyuri would like to make the best of the day in the absence of parents, but Vera refuses him. She becomes jealous at once, however, when she discovers Gyuri's previous girlfriend in the shooting team.

The celebrated actor considers his wife a nitwits actress of a mediocre talent. But an influential playwright, a friend of theirs, has written a play with the main role designed for her, Kati, particularly. Its title is "The Most Intelligent Woman in the World". On the day of the first night performance Kati recalls their past, the times she had together with her husband.

Using high-school students, Hungarian director Ferenc Kardos re-created the 1848 revolutionary period in that country's history which was dominated by the poet/soldier Sandor Petofi (1822-1849). Petofi wrote many epic poems which inspired Hungarian nationalism, the most well-known of which is Up Magyar! The students were encouraged to improvise without costumes or scenery, and did so with gusto.

Buda is mastered by the Turks. Student Gábor and his companion flee a troop into the castle, just in the garden of Gül Baba. Gábor and Leila, the daughter of Gül Baba fall in love with each other. Ali pasha, who wants to marry the girl, has the two Hungarians caught in order to let them be executed.

A horse goddess gives birth to three powerful brothers who set out into the Underworld to save three princesses from three evil dragons and reclaim their ancestors' lost kingdom.

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

The old, sickly Demeter Lapussa is a tyrant in the family. He forces his granddaughter, the beautiful Henriette, to marry baron Hátszegi, although the girl loves the penniless Vámhidy Szilárd. The two lovers attempt to commit suicide, then are torn away from each other.

A young peasant boy stands up to tyranny, aided by his trusting friend- a goose.

Csutak is just a pain in the neck, the little boy is even excluded from play by his mates. Vacation is spent lonely until one day he sneaks the woman haulier's old, shabby horse, a creature that would be better off in a slaughterhouse, out with himself. Possessing the animal is the key to the children's gang. They all try to find a place for the horse.