For the Cinephile non-competitive section we have chosen works of Hungarian directors.
Two blocks consisting of one feature film and three short films.

I See a Darkness

Twilight | György Fehér | Hungary | 1990 | Fiction | 101’

A much admired but long unavailable masterpiece by influential Hungarian auteur and regular Béla Tarr collaborator György Fehér, Twilight is at once an existential murder mystery and an expansive meditation on time and space. Stunningly lensed in rich blacks and cascading greys by cinematographer Miklós Gurbán (Werckmeister Harmonies, 2000), Tramway Film Festival is proud to present Twilight for its first-ever polish release in a brand new restoration by the National Film Institute – Hungarian Film Archive and FilmLab, supervised by Gurbán. The international premiere of the digitally restored version of the film took place at this year’s Berlinale.

The film has been mentioned in the same breath as other films at the time, like Damnation (Béla Tarr, 1988) and János Szász’s Woyzeck (1994), but in many ways, it’s more opaque than either of those films. The Hungarian film critic György Báron wrote that he knew few filmmakers who could penetrate human faces to such depths as György Fehér but mentioned Carl Theodor Dreyer as one of them.

Hungarian Neo-Avantgarde In Film

The second part of the Cinephile section is dedicated to the cinematographer and director János Tóth, a master of image design who is considered an iconic figure of Hungarian cinema.
He created a new genre in collaboration with Zoltán Huszárik – the film-poem (Capriccio, 1969). He reached the purest form of the film-poem with his own work Aréna (1970), which is constructed from dynamically changing image sequences. With a score by Péter Eötvös this was an example of the contemporary structural, material and linguistic film idiom for which the fascination at the Balázs Béla Studio was rapidly growing. In István Bácskai Lauró’s lyrical documentary Igézet (1963) film becomes the art of synaesthesia and organic poetry.

Films:
Capriccio | Zoltán Huszárik | Hungary | 1969 | 18’
Igézet | István Bácskai Lauró | Hungary | 1963 | 21’
Aréna | János Tóth | Hungary | 1970 | 23’