When Judit Elek heard some puzzling, if not outright disturbing stories about the daily life of girls and young women in the Hungarian provinces, she immediately travelled to one village, Istenmezején, to find out more about these occurrences.
It was here that young girls were married to miners, only to spend the rest of their lives doing household chores. In Istenmezején, Elek...
Reconstructions of unrealized Hungarian films in cooperation with the greatest Hungarian film directors.
Judit Elek’s final, more widely internationally recognised film (as well as her last to be screened in its day at IFFR) is a documentar y journey with writer/activist/academic Elie Wiesel. It explores several key places from his past including his hometown, Sighet, then and now Romanian but between 1940 and 1944 ruled by Hungary, and Owicim, infamous under its German name Aus...
In a society that measures a human being’s value by productivity, few questions could be more subversive than those concerning the value of people who aren’t working. Elek explores this through a labourer forced into retirement and his young replacement, a peasant in an industrial school.
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丈夫死后，曾是歌剧女演员的汉娜失去了自己的大房子，流落街头。当她重新回到家中时，一群黑手党派来的流浪汉占走了她的房子，这些人却将重新给她希望，告诉她爱的奇迹会发生在任何年龄的人身上。
Aged just 14, Solymosi Eszter vanished without a trace after having been sent on an errand on April 1, 1882. Soon, a rumour started to make the rounds in the village of Tiszaeszlár: a blood libel that Jews had killed the Christian servant girl. Paranoia grew when, more than two months later, the body of a drowned girl was brought out of the Tisza. At that point, voices in parli...
A man, a woman, an afternoon, a city, and an unspoken, hopeful desire to find love by way of the personal ads. A milestone of Hungarian cinema, Elek uses documentary techniques in a fiction context to make the frailty of everyday life as palpable as possible.
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Budapest in the 1950s. Kati is barely a teenager yet forced to fend for herself – her mother is dead, her father working far away in an iron foundry. And yet, she’s not alone: her mother’s ghost visits once in a while, when invoked by need or yearning, while more earthly characters like a young bookseller start to fill spaces in her life.
It seems telling that Judit Elek would ...
A couple in love, but sadly married to other partners. What is to be done Judit Elek’s delayed second fiction feature (after an enforced silence due to her iced Martinovics project), and her first one to screen at IFFR (after her cinéma vérité epic Istenmezején, IFFR 1976 and Egyszer trténet, IFFR 1976).
Furious energies are at work here: people hiss and holler truths and in...
Ignác Martinovics (1755-95) was a curious figure in Hungarian history: a member of the Franciscan order, ordained priest, academic in natural sciences, as well as a revolutionary, secret agent, agitator and organiser. During the reign of Emperor Leopold II, a true child of the Enlightenment, he worked for the State to further the cause of progressive change; while during the re...
Judit Elek’s oeuvre doesn’t consist of films alone. There are also some books – not many, but all of great importance and value. An early novella aside, these books are usually documentation that provide the historical materials several of her main works are based on, above all the trial against Ignác Martinovics in The Trial of Martinovics and the Hungarian Jacobins (1981), an...
A television documentary about singer/composer/actor Tamás Cseh, named after one of his songs where the first lines are: The first photo, you see, it’s me / and a wine glass on the table / the second picture, look, my father / the glass glitters as he raises it to his mouth.
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A television documentary about miners: the reality of their work versus how it is made to look and sound in the public sphere. It contrasts real people speaking in their own voice with the way officialdom speaks about them.
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A look at the present use of several Hungarian castles whose former owners in some cases are still around, but kept out of sight for being relics of a society the new rulers finished off. The buildings’ current usefulness as daycare centres or artists’ spaces doesn’t mean one cannot feel sorry for a world deemed obsolete.
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With the trust gained during the making of Istenmezején, Judit Elek continued to follow the happenings in the small village. What started as a specific investigation into the predicaments and dreams of the younger generation turns into a pars pro toto panorama of People's Hungary in various shades of grey – the economic reforms of 1968 and the cultural liberties supposedly conn...
