Acting
Hungarian Folktales is a Hungarian animated series. Each episode is based on a Hungarian folk tale. The creators paid special attention to using Hungarian folk motives in the episodes.
This Hungarian film chronicles the slow deterioration in the life of Juli, a farmer's wife. As the countryside grows ever more deserted because people are moving to towns or large collective farms, she spends more and more time alone. Despite her best efforts to appreciate her situation, her despair grows. The loneliness is briefly interrupted when she and her husband take in an old woman and care for her, but the woman dies. Shortly after her son visits, she is killed in an accident which may have been a suicide. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi
The head of the nunnery is dying, and the members are divided in two groups as the election of the new head approaches. Led by Virginia, the younger nuns stand up for changing the strict religious dogmas and would like a modern school with genuine science, a bathroom to be built, and a freer spirit. Their candidate is sister Magdolna, who went to secular universities, too. The seminarists, led by Király Erzsi, also rebel against the older nuns' strict discipline and the depressed atmosphere of the institution. However, Magdolna does not want to stay involved in the fight because she is deterred by Virginia's sinful attraction towards her and the tools Virginia is using to gain victory at any price.
A couple in love, but sadly married to other partners. What is to be done? A diagnosis of a comfortable but profoundly incapable society, a Hungary suffering from an endemic private life disorder, observable both among the urban middle and the rural lower classes. A descent into a relationship’s demise, more from the tired inertia of a country that has lost all direction and sense of purpose than any ill will.
The guard of the pond announces to Niklai, the president of the Mezőháti farmers' cooperative, that the agronomist Deczki has shipped one hundred and twenty kilos more fish than the amount on the waybill. The management decides to transfer the agronomist.
Widely known in the village how miser Berta is. Gossip says, even when her husband passed away a year ago she tried to buy a second-hand coffin to get him buried in. She's in good physical condition compare to her age, but one day she just can't get out of her bed. The village council hire a mom of 3 in order to help her in and around the house, and she paid by the council as Berta act like she has no money. Once, when the young mom doing her bed she finds her secret savings there, and turns out she is a wealthy woman. Now the council, as she can not be on social, decides to use her savings to pay her help, of course without letting her know that.
Andras (Zygmunt Malanowicz), an older man employed as a furniture designer, gets a life-jarring shock when he returns from a trip and finds that some of the work he developed has been given over to a younger employee. This instigates a mid-life crisis over his own identity and his sense of security and self-worth, all exacerbated by a recent divorce and estrangement from his son. Recognizing that he needs help, the man goes for therapy and starts to face his problems. Therapy counteracts some of the damage of living, and the man starts to consider his son, his relationships with women, and his father in a different light.
“I need a dog!" says Gabi, the main character in the film, to her parents. Every child has either a dog or a brother or sister! Well, if not a brother or sister, then a dog. I mean, a stray dog. "Who" can be rescued, taken into "shared care", looked after, fed, played with. But what happens when it turns out that the "common dog" - which a group of children have banded together to feed and care for - has a legal owner? And she is an old lady, whose only companion in her loneliness is this dog.
Dani, the few-month-old little boy born outside marriage is left by Eszter in the lap of her companion on the train. The widowed Aranka takes him willingly to her. The child is already ten years old and has a good life with Aranka. Then Géza enters their life and he does not welcome the child of someone else.
The story shows Emma's and Böbe's fight for survival, for keeping their position in society which they achieved with hard work in the previous regime. They don't want to lose their place and become village girls again.
The main character of this film reminiscent of political writing is Laci, the young and ambitious factory worker. He lives with his brother's family. After an unsuccessful attempt to escape from his native country and the prison sentence which follows it he gets employed by Pray, the progressive thinker, at a newly established computer centre. It is here that Laci learns to know Anna, the new-leftist university student, daughter of the general manager. Tóth, although he does not favour their relationship, does not oppose it either.
After the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a young Hungarian, wanted by the police for political crimes, escapes to just this side of the Austrian border. When he discovers that his escape contact has been shot, he disguises himself as a woman and, posing as a maid, takes refuge at a tuberculosis sanatorium. He lives there as a woman for the entire winter before resuming his journey in the spring.
After his divorce, Bóna Péter, a beginner film director needs a bigger amount of money to settle his financial problems with his ex-wife. He travels to Pécs to see Sárika, an old veteran. He has not seen his aunt for a long time, and she receives him very friendly, but she flatly refuses to lend him any money.
Director Sandor Simo based this film on his recollections of a period in his father's life just after World War II. In the film, Janos Torok is a chemist and an entrepreneur With enormous enthusiasm, he gets loans to purchase a small chemical plant and begins experiments to create innovative products, such as hormones. Meanwhile, the communist party has come to dominate Hungarian life in such a way that his activities are viewed as little more than criminal. He is hauled away to a prison camp, but even then his letters home are full of boundless optimism and his ideas for further experiments.
"Ripacsok" is a great movie with great soundtrack, acting, cinematography, direction, etc. The world of "artists", hamming actors, good clowns and bad clowns... A unique movie in many ways. Pál Sándor is a very good hungarian director, watch his movies (especially the slightly better "Régi idõk focija") if you have the chance.
