The late Hungarian film director Zoltan Fabri speaks to the Indian film critic Jugu Abraham in Budapest, Hungary, in 1982

Zoltan Fabri, 1917-94 (Courtesy: MUBI)

Transcript of the interview published in the daily newspaper The Telegraph, (Kolkata, India) on 15 August 1982 

Zoltan Fabri is not an unknown name in India. His films have been widely shown in screenings in India, courtesy NFDC, and he holds the distinction of winning two awards at the Delhi International Film Festival of India (IFFI). In 1979, Hungarians won the Golden Peacock for the Best Film and in 1981 his film Balint Fabian meets God was awarded the Silver Peacock for the Best Actor. Fabri is one of three great Hungarian filmmakers—Miklos Jancso and Istvan Szabo completing the trio. Jugu Abraham, who interviewed him in Hungary, found him to be ‘a lovely old man’ with impeccable manners and forthright views. The interview: 

Q. In India, we see a lot of your films but we hardly know anything of the person behind the camera. I would like to ask you something of your personal life. Your films have shown the protagonists playing very tragic and sombre roles, full of strife and sadness, in Hungary of the Second World War and before. Was your personal life as tragic, as difficult and as sombre as the heroes of your films?

A. My parents were relatively poor. My father worked in a bank as a clerk. In the summer, I lived with the peasants. And the reason peasants recur in my films is that I learned very much about their lifestyles. I went to school in town. I went to the College of Fine Arts. I wanted to be a painter. At that time film was not taught in college. I was born a weak child. I had problems with my tonsils which were removed, and I was beset by recurring illness of a weak heart.

Q. How much of your life was affected by the World Wars?

A.I was born during the First World War I have very few memories of that World War. We lived in misery. I was living in a big house with lots of people living in it. During the Second World War, I was in college, on a scholarship. In college, I would win at poetry recitals and wonder what I would do later in life. I had to choose between painting and directing plays. In my sixth form, I put up Julius Caesar and played Antony. But am I boring you?

Q. No, please continue.

A. So I joined the School of Fine Arts. At the end of the third year my father tried to find a job for me. He found me a job as a drawing teacher in one of the plush schools. But I decided to leave college.

One afternoon, I went to my father, who was shaving, and told him I am going to quit the School of Fine Arts and I intended to join the Theatre College. My father chased me like a mad man with a razor in his hand for 10 minutes. But after a lot of pleading, he agreed to let me try out theatre studies for a year at college. At the end of the year, my father went to the school to find out how I was doing. I was allowed to stay on. I need not elaborate why.

I finished the school in 3 years, making it clear that I did not want to be an actor but a director. I wrote scripts for an Ibsen play and even made sets for it. And the play was a great success. The production went through all the Budapest theatres in one year.

Two days after getting my degree, I got a letter from the National Theatre that I should go and discuss my contract. In my first play at the National Theatre, there were actors who had been my teachers at the college.

Q. Was your private life greatly affected during the Second World War?

A. In 1943, I was taken prisoner till 1945. I had no contact with my family at that time. I was single then. I wasn’t married. I returned to find Budapest totally bombed. As I approached my house, I found all our neighbouring houses were bombed but my parents’ flat had survived.  I found them safe. It was a horrible memory to reconstruct things.  I went back to theatre and worked in all Budapest theatres as a director, as a set director and sometimes as an actor.

Q. Today if you were to choose between film and theatre which would you choose?

A. I would choose film.

Q. Which films have been close to your personal life?

A. Twenty hours perhaps was one. Unfinished Sentence was almost as if it was written for me. I didn’t come from an aristocratic family but what happens in the family almost happened to me.

Q. Do you feel the characters in your films are reflections of your trials?

A. in my films, I am speaking about people who somehow have to get to the battlefield of history and they have to pass a trial of human conduct, a probe, a search.

Q. What do you feel about your black and white films like Merry Go Round visually?

A. In spite of the fact that I never became a painter, one cannot totally bring oneself to reconcile to making films in colour after making films in black and white.

Q. Why is it that you delve in the past? Doesn’t speculation of the recent past of your country or its future interest you? Science fiction, for instance.

A. I do not think I am suitable for science fiction or the like but I do think of the future. In Unfinished Sentence, I spoke about the future, in a way.  The future became the past in the film. The past and the present are in a very close relationship. You cannot for instance understand the present day Hungary without understanding the past. Consequently, when I make a film on the past, I want to communicate to the present viewer.

A still from the Golden Peacock (IFFI) winner "Hungarians"

Q. Would you like to comment on the fact that you made Balint Fabian meets God after you made Hungarians?  Hungarians chronologically should have come after Balint Fabian meets God.

A. It wasn’t my decision. Studios who wanted me to make Hungarians knew very well I wanted to make a film of Balint Fabian. I told them that chronologically it should be Balint Fabian meets God that should come first. But they considered Hungarians to have a more universal message. So they said “How do you know if you will ever get to finish Balint Fabian? So why not make Hungarians first? “ They were right in saying Hungarians contained the fate of a nation in a delicate and miserable situation, with a limited spectrum of thought and communication. At the same time, the characters in the film thought and expressed in a very universal way without being conscious of it.

A defining moment in The Fifth Seal; filming
"the most important question of our life" for Fabri

Q. Why did you pick up the book The Fifth Seal for a film?

A. I picked it up in 1965. But there were cultural-political reasons, which were against my plans to film it. First, they said it was an existentialist work.  I said that was not true at all. But they won. I could only make it in 1975-76. It was a great message for me to put on screen. First, I was challenged by the stage-like story—it is almost anti-film. The second part was more appropriate for cinema.

What basically attracted me were the four or five petty bourgeoisie characters talking of survival and the extent one can go to survive. As a counterpoint, there is a Fascist who is educating the younger person to emulate the other persons to achieve his own aims. The third part is how neither of the theories will work—neither of the petty bourgeoisie nor of the Fascist.

Q. What made you pick up the book? Did you like what was said in the story?

A. This thesis anti-thesis leading to synthesis formula I found most intriguing. And the most important question of our life is there.

Q. Are you religious?

A. I cannot make dogmatic religion acceptable for myself in spite of the fact that I went to a religious school when I was young. I believe in the moral content of religion; for me it is very significant to assess a person’s moral values. At the same time I am not bothered about a person’s religion or whether he practices it.  Morality is most important.

Crucial scene from Balint Fabian Meets God

Q. In India, after viewing your films, we get an idea that you are ambiguous in your treatment of religion. What is your personal attitude towards religion?

A. In Balint Fabian meets God, it is true that Balint Fabian’s relationship with religion is ambiguous. You can see it as self-sacrifice of a person deeply in love with his wife to meet God. Isn’t that true?

Q. Why are Russians kept out of your films?

A. I have no idea.

Q. Has any filmmaker influenced you other than Marcel Carne and Orson Welles?

A. The French directors, of course but Orson Welles influenced me most. Welles could not surpass what he did at 25—Citizen Kane—which can be appreciated and enjoyed even today.

Q. Children hardly occupy any place in your films. If they come in, they are only fringe characters. Is there any reason for it?

A. Basically, I don’t know why.

Q. Why have you specialized in tragedy? Is it something to do with your theatre experience?

A. Most probably because my view of life attracts me more to tragedy than to comedy. My mentality of daily life style is serious, not comic. However, in Two Half Times in Hell and in The Tot Family, I approach the tragicomic border.

Q. You have worked with Georgy Vukan as the music composer for the last five or six films. Would you like to tell us something about this man who has intrigued me with his music?

A. It is a personal relationship I have with him. He is an artist whom I like. He was a discovery of mine, you can say. I used his music when he was 21 years old. Now he is 30 or about that age.

Q. What do you feel about Boys on Paul Street made for Hollywood?

A. I liked the message of the book. It was not my best film. It was a “noble” film.

Q. What then was your best film?

A. You can pick between Prof Hannibal, Twenty Hours, The Fifth Seal and Hungarians.

P.S. The author's detailed review of Zoltan Fabri's film The Fifth Seal was published earlier on this blog. The Fifth Seal is one of the author's top 100  films ever made. (To access the review, click on the name of the film in this post-script.) The author, who was a staff film critic of the Hindustan Times group of publications in New Delhi, was invited to Budapest to interview Zoltan Fabri and Miklos Jancso in 1982. During the interactions, Fabri expressed his disappointment that US director John Huston's film Victory, in its credits, did not mention Fabri's earlier film Two Half Times In Hell, which was evidently a major source for the US director, a film personality who Fabri always admired.

The opening title sequence of Fabri's "The Fifth Seal" with the music of Georgy Vukan:

216. Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi’s film “Teströl és lélekröl” (On Body and Soul) (2017) (Hungary) based on her original screenplay: A stunning script involving dreams and matching dreamlike cinematography bring Hungarian cinema back to the heights it had climbed several decades ago.

 “Teströl és lélekröl  (On Body and Soul) is an idiosyncratic love story full of lyricism and humour, free of all social conventions. It impresses us with the subtlety and eloquence of its style and involves us in its joy of living and loving.” 

--- The citation for the FIPRESCI prize bestowed at the Berlin Film Festival

Hungarian cinema touched its zenith in the Seventies and Eighties when a group of remarkable Hungarian directors delivered their best works: Zoltan Fabri, Istvan Szabo, Miklos Jansco, Istvan Gaal, Karoly Makk, and Marta Meszaros—in that order.  Then there was a lull for several decades while the director Bela Tarr briefly captured the imagination of a new generation of filmgoers of the Nineties and at the turn of this century. Now in 2017, Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi brings back to the floundering Hungarian cinema the power of yore.

Just as Zoltan Fabri’s brilliant The Fifth Seal offered food for thought as few films do, director Ildikó Enyedi presents in On Body and Soul a range of philosophical thoughts captured through near silent sequences that discusses issues pertaining to the human body and soul---often presenting contrasting ethereal natural behaviour of animals in the forest with the bloody horror of an abattoir for another set of animals.  

The stag and the doe--arresting award-winning cinematography of Mate Herbai

On Body and Soul is not about animals—it is about us, human beings.  The main plot is an unusual love story of a physically unattractive old cripple falling in love with an emotionally crippled beautiful woman half his age. Director and scriptwriter Enyedi evidently loves to study body and soul in many facets of everyday life, not just limited to the world of a Hungarian abattoir.  If one looks at the subjects the film present, they could present obvious metaphors for larger geographies.  

Enyedi chose Hungarian cinematographer Máté Herbai (who has primarily worked with the little- known but not insignificant Hungarian director Atilla Gigor) to bring magic to her feature film made after a significant 18 year hiatus from making regular feature films, just as Terrence Malick took a 20 year break  between Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line. Enyedi’s last feature film was Simon the Magician (1999) that won awards worldwide following her 1989 Cannes winner My Twentieth Century. Now, Herbai (under directions of Enyedi) ,captures intimate  images of a stag with antlers in the company of a doe in a snowy forest.  There is no copulation on screen but the animals are evidently attracted to each other.  The film sequences seem to talk to the viewer.  That’s the first chapter of the “soul” in the film.

The lead characters go home after work separately
until their separate dreams bring them together

Enyedi and Herbai follow up with a contrapuntal sequence also bereft of music. This is of cattle waiting quietly before they are slaughtered. Herbai captures the eyes of the bull which seems to anticipate its fate as it looks through its cage at the slaughterhouse workers as they casually chat before they begin their day’s work. Both the lady janitor and the bull looks up at the sun tying up humans and animals in a cosmic silent gesture.  Enyedi and Herbai do not show the actual slaughter—only the preparation and the aftermath. Yet, the sequence is chilling and yet aesthetically rendered.

The filmmakers state in the end-credits that no animal was killed specifically for the film but they merely recorded an actual event in the abattoir.  That’s the second “chapter” of the film that gradually moves from the “soul” to the “body,” from the shots of the live animal to its dead body as prime beef portions. This sequence is not for the queasy animal lovers in the audience but yet it is aesthetically presented as few filmmakers can.

The CFO (Morcsanyi) watches his new Quality Inspector (Borbely) at work

As the film progresses, the viewer realizes Enyedi has merely introduced us to the human soul and body in the main plot of the film bringing to the fore the human stag and the human doe, connected through dreams.  While scientifically much of Enyedi’s imaginative tale can be pooh-poohed, the tale is extraordinary.  It is the unusualness of the situation that grabs the viewer. We are presented a man who is a cripple, who once had an active sex life, and now has a grown up daughter, suddenly taking an interest in a reclusive new worker in the abattoir, where he is the influential Chief Financial Officer (CFO).  Enyedi ‘s and Herbai’s initial visual introduction of the lady is superb: she is standing outside the building alone, while others are chatting in groups.  She retreats into the shadows when she realizes her legs are being burnt by the sun’s rays.  Enyedi develops her character as one who is very smart—one who can figure out likely conversations between people without hearing them, a person who can recall dates of incidents in her life perfectly unlike most of us, a person who takes her job seriously and professionally. Even her plate of food is carefully placed to geometric alignment. (Oh, Enyedi, how I admire the lovely details of your script!) And she is naive about sex (and music) even though men are attracted towards her but is evidently interested in experiencing it.

Enyedi does the same with the human “stag.” He once had a fair share of women in his life. The CFO still has a glad eye for sexy women that comes in his view but has grown up sufficiently to apologize profusely when he caught staring. Unlike the human doe who believes in rules, the CFO knows how to keep the local police chief happy by presenting him choice portions of beef. Unlike the human doe, the human stag has no problems meeting up with strangers. They are contrasting characters

What brings the opposites together?   Dreams. Sigmund Freud would have laughed at the amazing proposition of Enyedi’s film but even the stodgiest detractor will have to agree the improbable scenario presented in the film could happen. After all, it is a reworking of the Beauty and the Beast tale, cleverly packaged.

Separate bedrooms in a split screen. Both characters look forward to their dreams
as they prepare to sleep

The film is not just Enyedi and Herbai. The lead male role of Endre, the CFO, is played by a nonprofessional actor, Geza Morcsanyi, who in real life is a successful publisher of Hungarian books, has never acted in a film before and may not in the future.  However, he does edit film scripts and has written one screenplay. The female lead, Maria, is played by Alexandra Borbely, who has acted in a couple of feature films. The lead actors are very convincing.

Geza Morcsanyi plays the CFO

The film introduced this film critic to the wonderful voice, songs and lyrics of British folk singer Laura Marling whose song “What he wrote” wraps up the film. The lyrics of the song do not tie up with the story of the film. My guess is that scriptwriter/director Enyedi merely introduced Marling to the viewers as an extension of the sequence where music store owner suggests a CD  as good music to the character Maria who cannot make up her own mind on what music CD to buy and ends up buying the suggested disc.

Enyedi’s film is one of the best films of 2017. What is amusing is how a lady scriptwriter is able to create the minor characters—the sex obsessed male workers, the amusing psychologist, and the side plot of a worker stealing sex stimulants for human consumption that was meant for animals about to be butchered.  The film is Hungary’s submission for the Best Foreign Film category at the 2017 Oscars.  A formidable one indeed! Hungarian cinema is back at the top.

P.S. The film On Body and Soul won four awards and honours at the Berlin Film Festival: The Golden Bear award for the best film of the year; the FIPRESCI Prize; the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury; and the Prize of the Reader Jury of the daily Berliner Morgenpost .  It also won the prestigious 2017 Cameraimage Award for its cinematography by Mate Herbai and the top award at the Sydney film festival. It also won the audience award at the Mumbai film festival. Hungarian director Zoltan Fabri’s The Fifth Seal (1976) and Terrence Malick's  Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line have been reviewed earlier on this blog. (Click on the names of the films in this post script to access those reviews.)

180. The late Hungarian maestro Zoltan Fabri’s “Az ötödik pecsét” (The Fifth Seal) (1976) based on Ferenc Sánta’s novel: The ultimate debate on conscience and self-respect

Very few films deal with philosophy and ethical human choices under extreme testing situations.  The Fifth Seal is one that not only presents a philosophical dilemma on screen but will make any intelligent and sensitive viewer to ponder over his or her own choice under similar circumstances.  The film directed by Zoltan Fabri (1917-94) won the Golden Prize of the Moscow Film Festival in 1977. The film is based on a novel written by Ferenc Santa, arguably the finest Hungarian writer who has won almost all the top honours in that country. Santa himself wrote the screenplay of the film and, therefore, one can guess the film reflects the novel’s content pretty accurately.  This is the second work of Fabri that was based on a Ferenc Santa novel—the first being Twenty Hours (1965). Both films won the top award in the respective years at the Moscow Film Festival. The Fifth Seal is one of the top 100 films of this critic and the film made such a positive impact on him that he travelled to Budapest in 1982 and succeeded in interviewing the director. (The exclusive interview was published in the English daily newspaper, The Telegraph, of Kolkata, India, in 1982.)

The book seller, the watchmaker. the carpenter, and the bar keeper meet as usual
-- the photographer (with his back to the camera) is invited to join them 

The basic debate on conscience is raised during a meeting of four friends in a Budapest bar, set during the Nazi occupation of Hungary during World War II, though the film/novel focuses on the Hungarian Arrow Cross officials who sympathized with the Nazis. But the mention of the Russians replacing the Arrow Cross, give away the obvious intention of the writer/director.  The question thrown up in The Fifth Seal is, if we were to die today, whether one would like to be reborn as a powerful, rich, cruel dictator/slave owner who does not believe he/she is doing anything unethical or as a slave who is poor and is continuously brutalized and humiliated by his/her master and yet is happy that he/she has not done any action that is wrong in spite of his/her powerless condition.

Keszei, the photographer, makes the crucial soliloquy quoting the relevant
 passage of the Bible on the Fifth Seal 

To appreciate The Fifth Seal sufficiently, it would help considerably if the viewer has some knowledge of the Holy Bible and of visual art, specifically the works of the Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516). The reasons are simple. The title of the film refers to the following excerpt from the Holy Bible:  

“When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained.” Revelation 6:9. 

Further, a character in the film/novel, Karoly Keszei, who is an artistic photographer and a wounded ex-soldier, refers to the above passage, specifically mentioning the Fifth Seal, in a crucial monologue in the film.

Similarly the artist Bosch has additional relevance in the film The Fifth Seal. The book seller, László Kiraly (László Márkus), who is referred to mockingly as the “intellectual” in the film/novel, states that he procured two prized portions of meat for consumption, shown in the film, on selling a Bosch painting, or possibly, a book on Bosch’s paintings.  Director Fabri intercuts important pieces of dialogue with visuals of Bosch’s paintings. And interestingly much of Bosch’s famous paintings deal with the Book of Revelation in the Holy Bible, the perverted delights of a sinner, and martyrdom of various early Christians. (Bosch is increasingly being acknowledged today as the first surrealist painter, while surrealism as a movement is often considered to have begun only in the 1920s. Works of Dali and those of Bosch are so strikingly similar, that one wonders how four centuries could separate them.) And the film's director Fabri does not stop with the paintings—he recreates visuals from Bosch’s paintings with live human beings for the bookseller Kiraly to fantasize in a drunken stupor while reflecting on the philosophical issues raised in the film/novel earlier.

The crucial moment towards the end of the film that redefines
all that the viewer hasbeen shown and believes

The film can be divided into three segments though these are seamless. The first is the situation in the bar where Miklós Auricular (Lajos Öze) a watchmaker, Kiraly the book seller, János Kovacs  (Sándor Horváth) a carpenter, and Béla (Ferenc Bencze) a barkeeper meet and discuss a variety of subjects in the presence of Keszei, the artistic photographer, who joins these gentlemen for a drink by accident. The second segment takes the characters out of the bar, where each come to a decision as to who he would like be reborn as. The third segment puts all the characters in an extreme environment, where interestingly for different reasons, all the characters seemingly reverse their earlier decision made in the film to the question posed by Mr Auricular. One metaphoric aside made by Mr Auricular is whether you would choose to eat veal breast or an artichoke, if given an option, referring directly to the piece of meat the book-seller has procured to eat later. The third segment adds another aspect to the final decisions—the aspect of self respect.

Bosch’s surreal images and the surrealist manifesto of the 1920s would nudge the viewer at the grim end of the film. All through the film, an intelligent viewer will note the characters in the film constantly reassess their philosophical stance or points of view, according to circumstances. Nothing is as per the obvious. Keszei, the photographer, lost his leg on the war front, like the slave in the philosophical conundrum and believes he has a clear conscience. Yet his actions prove to be the opposite. The viewer would also need to reassess his/her judgements of the characters the end of the film, particularly in in view of the past and possible future intentions/actions of Mr Auricular.

Mr Auricular, the watchmaker, asks the carpenter the difficult
philosophical question

The final shots of the film underscore the fact that one is ultimately alone and the final decision of a reflective soul could surprise oneself. This movie is undoubtedly the best work of Zoltan Fabri, a marvellous filmmaker, who most cineastes the world over have yet to discover. And this is possibly the best work of the author/novelist Ferenc Sánta, little known outside his country. This is a film with superb performances (especially Lajos Öze as Mr Auricular), the lovely music of Georgy Vukan that opens (with colourful details) and closes (in deliberate contrast with a dark, blank screen) the film, intelligent editing (Ferencné Szécsényi), and needless to add, a great script. The “intellectual” in the film would like to distract himself with music or play snooker, when someone has been shot dead outside. These are some of the little nuggets of detail that make this work truly outstanding.

What is so remarkable about the film? The viewer will find that as the film progresses, the viewer's own judgement of the principal characters' response to their individual conscience keeps changing right up to the end. That's what will make you think deeply about this work of cinema.

Thank you, Mr Zoltan Fabri and Mr Ferenc Sánta, for the top-notch cinema.

P.S. The full movie is available on You Tube.  The film is one of the author’s best 100 films. The author had interviewed Mr Zoltan Fabri in Budapest in 1982 as a staff film critic of a daily newspaper published from New Delhi, India. The author suspects Larissa Shepitko's Russian film The Ascent (1977) borrowed heavily from The Fifth Seal following its Golden Prize win at Moscow Film Festival early in 1977.  It is very likely that Shepitko had viewed the Hungarian film and structured her own script on the lines of the Hungarian film. Most viewers who laud Shepitko's film are not aware of Fabri's film. The author's 1982 interview with Mr Fabri in Budapest, Hungary, is also published on this blog. 

74. Hungarian director Árpád Bogdán’s debut film "Boldog új élet (Happy New Life)" (2007): More than a look at an orphan’s loneliness

Debut films reveal a director’s inherent creative attempts to seduce the viewer much more than what is evident in their later body of work. Some directors mature with each film, making each new film more alluring than their first attempt at cinema. These exceptions are few and far between—Bergman, Kieslowski, Kubrick, Tarkovsky, Terrence Mallick, and John Cassavetes are among the few who evolved for the better after their debut films. Many like Orson Welles don't.

Árpád Bogdán’s debut film seduces you with stylized visuals and an intensity that gives you an insight into the director’s mind. His profound knowledge of the subject is evident throughout a film that is bereft of sex and violence. There is a poetic feel to the images that include a horse running wild on the streets of Budapest before it is caught and led into a horse trailer. The sequence is an eerie symbolic reminder of earlier visuals in the film of the young boy fleeing from parents/elders being arrested by police with the mother figure urging the child to run before he himself is caught and taken to an orphanage, psychologically scarred. And later, having seen the film, I was not surprised to discover on the Internet that this interesting film on institutionalized orphans has been made by a man who himself lived with a foster family until 14 and never enjoyed regular schooling. And yet he is a poet and a painter to boot! Is a young Paradjanov emerging in Hungary? Happy New Life seduces you as visual poem would, revealing some emotions and submerging others for the interested viewer to discover. Not surprisingly, much of it is autobiographical.

The importance of a debut film is often increased when the screenplay is written by the director himself/herself. Young Bogdán has predictably written the screenplay himself. He does not need anyone else to write out the screenplay. The story is of an orphan who grew up in a state-run orphanage, who having grown up leaves the state-run foster-care to earn a living and raise a family. Family life is a simple gift most of us enjoy, but has eluded the protagonist in the film, save for some fleeting memories of childhood. Only four women enjoy fleeting screen time in the film, a woman in a poster advertising a perfume who comes alive in a dream sequence, an old woman who is a foster mother of an orphan girl, images of a lost mother, and finally the young orphan girl who is missing her real mother. If you look at the choice of womanhood presented , all life stages are covered. Yet there is no obvious man-woman relationship as in other regular films--because the growth of the young man is stunted by events. Yet the film presents "empty" dining spaces in a factory and foetal-curled positions that describe loneliness of the protagonist. The film says much visually. Spoken words are few. Compared to a recent wordy film on orphans from Australia December Boys (2007), Happy New Life would be close to a silent film. But with poets like Bogdan, long conversations are excess baggage to avoid.

Before the film begins, there is a preface from the director of the large numbers of young Hungarian “orphans” under state care who when grown up are thrown up to enter society as equals and build their own families. The protagonist wants to know his past. He stumbles on something from documents in an envelope handed over by a benevolent warden. The viewers of the film later see him shredding the envelope and its contents. The warden noting that the information has only had a negative effect on the young man regrets his decision but invites his past ward to visit his new rural home. The film would appear to be despondent one because the director opts to leave the real issues partly hidden for the viewer to ferret out.

Happy New Life forced me to recall another debut film tackling existential, social and moral questions—Claude Chabrol’s Le beau Serge (1958), arguably his finest work that kicked off the new cinema movement in France. In that film, too, one of the two buddies, François shouts at Serge "You're like animals, as though you had no reason for living." Responds Serge: "We haven't. How could we? The earth's like granite; they can barely scrape a living. They work because they've no choice.” In Happy New Life, too, the young orphan does not really see a “reason for living” when he comes out of orphanages, especially if he knows who he really is. Director Árpád Bogdán has stated in an interview that even if the film presents a despondent view, unlike the film's story he has personally looked at life positively by creating movies, drawing paintings, and writing poems. One hopes that this minor Manfred Salzgeber award winning film at the 2007 Berlin Film Festival propels the director to make even better cinema than this one.

Many questions would irk the alert viewer after viewing the film. Is the film merely on loneliness of orphans? Aren’t there sufficient messages in the film about gypsy families in Hungary and elsewhere in Europe, though the term "gypsy" is never mentioned? The young director has admitted his interest in romology (the study of gypsies, their language and sociology). Bulgarian director, Milena Andanova, recently made an interesting but less stylized film Monkeys in Winter (2006) dwelling on this emerging topic for filmmakers in Europe just as some American filmmakers such as Abraham Polonsky tried to provide the American Indian’s viewpoint in a revisionist western Tell them Willie Boy is Here (1969). Just as the issues relating to the broken promises made to American Indians are rarely discussed in USA, the gypsies of Europe found their issues swept under the carpet by each country and regime.

The two cinematographers who worked on the film Happy New Life include Gábor Szabó, a young Hungarian cameraman chosen by Vilmos Zsigmond, to film his own first film The Long Shadow (1992). Szigmond is a reputed cameraman from Hungary who made his mark in Hollywood and if he felt confident with Szabo it is no surprise that Bogdán picked him as well. It is unusual that two cinematographers share the credits for Happy New Life, Mark Gyori (film editor as well on this film) with Szabo as the second. Did Bogdán and Szabo fall out?

Hungarian filmmakers have mesmerized me, particularly Zoltan Fabri, Istvan Szabo and to some extent Miklos Jancso—so much so that as a young film critic I traveled across continents from New Delhi to Budapest to interview two of them in 1982. Fabri would have been pleased with the work of young Bogdán, if he were alive today.

37. Hungarian director Lajos Koltai's "Sorstalansag (Fateless)" (2005): A thought-provoking film on the Nazi horrors

Many directors have made acclaimed movies on the horrors of the Nazi perpetrated holocaust, the gas chambers, and the concentration camps. This work stands out as one of the very few intelligent films reflecting on the effect of the atrocities on those directly and indirectly affected, rather than a clever film milking the pathos of the tragic events. Here is a film that telescopes the tragedy beyond the World War II for the main character a teenage Jewish boy (and the viewer) to the post-war human interactions. Here is a film that does not stop as a celluloid memorial for the Jews, but makes one reflect on human behavior worldwide while facing similar horrors—the Pol Pot genocide in Cambodia, the tragic ethnic cleansing of Muslims in post-Tito Yugoslavia, the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur…the list goes on.

How does this film end up being different? The Nobel prize winning story alludes to camaraderie of the oppressed in concentration camps, prisons and other unusual bonding of strangers for survival. The 'free' world rarely provides that bonding. The film and the story are thus made up of two parts: the incarceration and the freedom. In the free world, a German asks the survivor if he ever saw the gas chambers and the honest answer is "no." And that comforts the guilty suspicion of the non-Jewish German.

Much of the film centers on the capturing the emotions of the boy, without spoken words. This might appear unusual but study the gradual use of shadows, the dirt, and the evidence of tears. The controlled bleached color prints add to the visceral visual power of the film. These are images that you will not forget even after you leave the theater (or switch off the Indian TV channel, as in my case)

There are sequences that suggest more than what is shown on screen. A guard takes an odd liking for the young boy and keeps staring at him instead of others, once in the suburbs of Budapest and then again in the concentration camp. The special care in the infirmary could allude to Nazi medical experiments. Delving on those details would have reduced the real strength of the film. It is easy for many whose fate was death in the camps. There are half dead men who refuse to accept their fate as they are carried away to the gas chambers. And there are young men fated to live and survive in a difficult inhospitable world and accept this as their fate and move on. They are the "fateless" few.

This work turned out to be remarkable because of the outstanding team behind it. The story and screenplay is by 2002 Nobel prize winner Imre Kertesz who won the prize a few years before the film was made. The story is semi-auto biographical The acclaimed Hungarian cinematographer turned director Lajos Koltai and Italian Ennio Morricone team up once again after the two weaved celluloid magic in The legend of 1900 (reviewed earlier in this blog). The camera is not with Koltai but Gyula Pados this time, but Koltai would have contributed to the photography. Another marvel of the film are the vocal renderings of Australian Lisa Gerrard (of Dead can dance) that alternate with pan pipes conducted by Morricone.

Three remarkable films on the Nazi atrocities evoked similar feelings for me: the outstanding 10-hour cinematic docudrama by Hans-Jurgen Syberberg Hitler-A film from Germany that led essayist Susan Sontag to write an equally outstanding critical essay on the film, Zoltan Fabri's The Fifth Seal (referring to the Bible's Revelations) the finest Hungarian film that needs to be seen more widely also based on a major Hungarian novel (by Ferenc Santa) and Istvan Szabo's touching mystical and allegorical Budapest Tales that said everything about the Nazi occupation without a shot of the concentration camps by portraying dislocated Jews, strangers to one another, coming together to put a symbolic trashed Budapest tramcar back on the rails far away from the city. Arguably these three films along with Fateless constitute the finest and the most accomplished body of cinema on the subject. If you prefer straight easy tear-jerkers try Steven Spielberg's films on the subject, Polanski's The Pianist, Benigni's Life is Beautiful or even Louis Malle's Au revoir, les Enfants—all good, acclaimed films but not quite in the same league.

P.S. At the Berlin Film Festival, Fateless lost out to two remarkable films I have seen that won the major awards: U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha from South Africa and Kong Que (reviewed earlier in this blog) from China. Like Fateless, the Chinese film was also the first directorial effort of an accomplished cinematographer.