György Illés

In 1944 Budapest, one of a group of four friends poses a hypothetical moral question to the others, an act that will unexpectedly alter their lives forever.

In Budapest, two rival gangs of young boys lay claim to a vacant lot. The hostilities escalate yet never quite boil over into actual violence.

On the Spring of 1945 the Jackson circus is heading towards the border with the clown Peti and Aida, the elephant. They have to play for the Hungarian Fascists, while Peti is hiding the Jew Annuska and Sanyika.

When András, Albert and Bence are on a cycling tour around Lake Balaton, their dreams come true. Sunshine, beach and pretty girls. András and his younger brother run after the same girl, Eszter. András persuade his brother not to pinch the girl. András pick her up one night and split up with her next day. Eszter follows the boy, but András sends her away...

A group of landless Hungarian peasants accept work as migrant-laborers on a farm in northern Germany where the wages are good, and the wives and family are allowed to accompany them. Though it is in the midst of World War II, they are relatively well-off. However, they glimpse the treatment accorded to POWs and others who are not so gently treated, 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. This film is part of a series of films by award-winning, well-respected director Zoltan Fabri who devoted much time and effort chronicling the struggle against fascism.

This lavishly spectacular film focuses on the character of Lőrinc Parcen Nagy from the 1200-page Tibor Déry novel interwoven with numerous autobiographical elements. Lőrinc Parcen Nagy is the offspring of an upper middle class family, whose life is marked by two violent deaths: the suicide of his father and the slaughter of an innocent worker. He breaks with his family and his mother in disgust; she is of weak character, a person who abandoned her own husband. He is also unable to discover the right tone with his colleagues and his lover who is an illegal party worker.

Vörös Hajnal (Red Dawn), a co-operative is the venue of skylarking, while the storm destroys the wheat which is to be harvested soon. Árendás, a middle-peasant, voices severe accusations against members of the co-operative: out of negligence, they failed to keep the ditches clean. It is always the soft option they seem to favour, while the necessity of properly taking care of the farmlands is long-forgotten. Members of the co-operative and the village people are deeply divided.

Three people – a returned prisoner of war, his beautiful second wife, and the possessive, hunchbacked spinster who is his sister-in-law by his first marriage – are isolated in a little house under an extinct volcano, where each strives for personal happiness but is suffocated by their dependence on the others.

The chroniclers are diligently scribbling the history of life and deeds of the virtuous and wise King Matthias, who, in the meantime, sneaks out of the palace in disguise. Instead of attending a boring reception of the imperial deputies and papal legates, he pays his address to three pretty women from Szelistye.

The Toth family resides in Northern Hungary. The couple has a daughter and a son, the latter a member of the armed forces. When his weary major is ordered to take a vacation, the son talks him into a visit to his family home. Comedy ensues when the Toths go overboard trying to make things pleasant for the visiting major in hopes of an easier life for their son the soldier.

In the vocational school the professionally excellent Dani János works on his own invention in his leisure time, but he does not like learning. However, even his own father learns in the evenings, he will become a teacher.

1943. French POWs escape through Hungary towards the Balkan. Jacques and Gérard are caught and taken to an internment camp at Lake Balaton. Jacques meets Klári here, who was abandoned by her military officer husband for her Jewish origin. Both want to have a short affair, but love unfolds between them.

When a young boy comes in to see a doctor abourt a red mark on his face, the doctor's wife welcomes him into the consulting room instead. As they talk, she offers him something to eat and then notes that his manner of eating is just like that of her previous husband, who died in prison many years earlier. It turns out that the young man had been his cell mate for a year, and he tells her the story of how her husband died. She then remembers (in flashbacks) how she had helped her first husband rid himself of his sexual repression, and how she had promised him she would marry her current husband if she were widowed. It seems her doctor-husband was a man who could remain untouched through any political climate, and was much admired by her first husband. Now that her memories have been awakened by the young man's account, she ignores the repeated phone calls of her current husband and decides to rid this young man of his own sexual repressions.

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.

SS doctor during the war worked on the serum of cancer, but discovered a terrible poison, one vial is enough to kill 100 000 people. 20 years after the war, the old Nazi gets out of prison, and the hunt for him and his discovery begins.

The grey hero of grey workdays, the divorced cashier of a cinema who is always willing to sacrifice herself for others, Etelka, is awarded a two-week-holiday at Lake Balaton. Following the advice of her female friend, she tries to live life at full speed.

The engineer Ambrus has been suspended in his job because he publicly called the attention of the customers to a construction mistake of some goods designed to be exported. His immediate boss learns the news on a business trip to Paris. He meets his old friend Lendvay, an emigrant from Hungary, and his French wife in a cellar bar. After their talk Benkő starts seeing things in a different perspective. When he returns home, he decides to take a stand for Ambrus against Ferenczi, the general director, despite his wife's and the old director's advice.

Following his wedding, Feri left the co-operative and is now working on the land of his father-in-law. Tóth is extremely wilful and thrifty, working from early morning to late night, pushing his family as well.

This propaganda film from the early years of socialist transformation in Hungary depicts kulak sabotage in production cooperatives. The prosperous peasant Ignatz Hato, one of the best farmers in the village, joins the Two Octobers cooperative, and soon all the small peasants follow him. The village rich, led by Lili Sohar, watching the great expansion of the cooperative, try to break up the cooperators with each other. Sohar's attempt bears fruit and Hato leaves the cooperative. Next, Lili Sohar tries to convince Ignatz Hato that she is planning to create a rival team of new rich people and urges him to join her. Ignatz refuses and does not give in to the blackmail. Lili's lover, a former gendarme, shoots party secretary Bozhine. At the wounded Božine's bedside, Ignác admits his mistake and asks to be accepted back into the cooperative. Sándor, the president of the cooperative, realizes that the collective should not prevent those who want to work honestly from joining.

Jirka is a composer, his wife, Jana, a pianist. Jana would like to have an own concert, but so far she has only been selected to accompany Valenta during his concerts in Budapest. After some resentments, she accepts the proposal.