Hungarians @ The Titanic Film Festival

  • 2 Apr 2014 9:00 AM
Hungarians @ The Titanic Film Festival
This year’s Titanic Festival – running between 4-12th April – will also present the works of Hungarian film makers too. Erik Novák’s brand-new action-thriller and black comedy mixture Black Soup will have its premiere screening at the festival. Simon Szabó’s short film Wall that won the main award at the Tampere Short Film Festival, and Réka Bucsi’s animation short Symphony no. 42 that competed in the Berlinale can also be watched at Titanic. The original score for the Turkish movie The Long Way Home was written by Mihály Víg, and a special film selection and a round table-discussion will commemorate the recently deceased Miklós Jancsó.

The premiere of Erik Novák’s latest movie Black Soup will be held at the 21th Titanic Festival. The formula of this action-thriller looks as follows: a flat broke director who wants to make a movie at any cost, a gifted group of friends from every part of the film industry, plus a brilliant story seasoned with black humour, experimentalist frame of mind and big balls.

This independent Hungarian production with a staff of film professionals and well-known stars is a completely unprecedented community project where everybody worked for free, in exchange for a share of property. A DJ (Zoltán Perjés) deep in financial troubles gets the opportunity to grab some easy money and he turns to his old buddy and his associates (Erik Novák, Zsolt Nagy, Simon Szabó, Hermina Fátyol), now sitting in a lunatic asylum, to help out with a hold-up.

The weirdly recruited team pulls off the job - but soon they have to realize that the money they nicked means more trouble than they thought. The fact that the actors use their name in the film and the dialogues are based on improvisation mixed with the real life personas and problems of the actors contributes to the unique tone of the film, achieving an overlap between reality and fiction.

Simon Szabó will not only appear at this year’s Titanic as an actor. The latest harvest of his director career (Zsebzsötem, Let’s roll, Paper Planes, Hungary 2011) is a ten-minute short called Wall which is part of the program. The protagonist Laci is a 16-year old Gypsy boy, who lives off casual jobs. One day, he gets picked up from the streets along with a small group of workers for a construction job. He has to participate in the completion of a wall, that surrounds a series of tenement buildings. In the end, he is asked to complete the work. He now takes his first look beyond the wall.

The short film won the main award at the Tampere Short Film Festival this year which means to be automatically nominated for the European Film Awards being announced in Riga in December 2014.

At the 21th Titanic Réka Bucsi’s animation short Symphony no. 42 can also be watched. It competed in the Berlinale and is the director’s graduate film at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art And Design. The film tells of a mythical world devoid of morality in 47 images . Two polar bears sit in deckchairs by the river and fish, a shot is fired. A woman wears a fox as a stole around her neck. Two elderly ladies wait at a zebra crossing where the flow of cars is directed by a traffic light. One of them holds a barking dog on a leash. The other takes a pair of scissors and cuts the leash.

The original score for the Turkish movie in competition The Long Way Home directed by Alphan Eşeli was written by Hungarian musucuan Mihály Víg. Finally, the 21th Titanic will commemorate the recently deceased Miklós Jancsó with a special retrospective in Örökmozgó cinema. The film selection entitled The Unknown Jancsó contains less-known pieces of the oeuvre in which the audience can discover new dimensions of Jancsó’s huge and complex art work. Dawn (1985), The Pacifist (1970), Omega, Omega (1982), Heroes’ Square – A Subjective Historical Tale I-II. (1997) and a block of shorts will be screened in this section. The films will be introduced by film theorists and a round table-discussion will close the program.

The final program of the festival can be checked on titanicfilmfest.hu

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