Production
Tibor and Niki, father and daughter. The young girl was only five years old when they last saw each other, before Tibor was sent to prison. He is released seven years later and tries not to think about the past. Yet he can’t erase his daughter from his life and so they are compelled to start over from the beginning. Both are irresistibly charismatic, headstrong and irascible, but also determined to find a way back to one another.
It’s summer in Budapest, high school student Abel is struggling to focus on his final exams, whilst coming to the realisation that he is hopelessly in love with his best friend Janka. The studious Janka has her own unrequited love with married history teacher Jakab—who had a previous confrontation with Abel’s conservative father. The tensions of a polarised society come unexpectedly to the surface when Abel’s history graduation exam turns into a national scandal.
33-years old Tamás Merthner is heartbroken, after his girlfriend Anna, who is on a scholarship in Paris, breaks up with him. While wallowing in self-pity, Tamás takes a trip down memory lane to figure out if love only exists when it's practically gone. As he's trying to pick up the pieces, he begins to realize what makes this current society so confused, which gives us a highly subjective view of Hungary's present.
Without a permanent home and the security of a social network, a 16-year-old girl comes to a city to find a friend and perhaps even a companion. On her wanderings through the city, she meets him in the middle of a crowd. They spend a day together and are separated while stealing from a supermarket. Now the girl is on her own again and is once more confronted with her loneliness.
Ten-year-old Palkó has just moved home to Budapest from Berlin and observes the daily life of an ordinary Hungarian elementary school with confused amazement. Juci, the young teacher just started working there. She is the only one who understands Palkó, as in their own way, they are both suffering from the same, sometimes grotesque educational system.
Edina is a middle aged, aloof intellectual, who ends up at a beauty salon doing a full-on bikini wax. As the process goes, she gets more and more in touch with her inner pain and gradually connects with her suppressed conscious.
The first woman rabbi in the world, Regina Jonas, comes to light, courtesy of Rachel Weisz – who plays her – and her father George Weisz, who was the executive producer for this poetic and beautiful documentary. The daughter of an Orthodox Jewish peddler, Jonas was ordained in Berlin in 1935. During the Nazi era and the war, her sermons and her unparalleled devotion brought encouragement to the persecuted German Jews. Regina Jonas was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. The only surviving photo of Jonas serves as a leitmotif for the film, showing a determined young woman gazing at the camera with self-confidence.
34 year old Bálint Szentesi does the seemingly superficial job of communication training during the daytime and dutifully spends time with his pregnant wife in the evening. One day, he finds a piece of paper with his handwriting in his basement.
After the death of his brother, modern-day slave Gábor (50) along with another slave Veronika tries to find his deceased brother’s papers to properly bury him outside the farm. Their captors would want to keep this all quiet and hinder Gábor from doing so.
Vincent, a reckless French boy, travels to Hungary to liquidate the home of a relative he has never seen. In an apartment cluttered with dusty objects and furniture, he is confronted not only with the past of others, but also with his own present.
Áron stands in his life as an average 29-year-old weirdo. He has many contemporary complexes, a fresh university degree, and a recent break up. His parents have to support him financially as he is still a job seeker and while Áron is agonizing on his lost love, he is always interrupted by something; it seems like he’s not the main character in his life.
