Dani Szabo Movies

One young man's devastating voyage through the Holocaust sets the stage for this powerful drama. Gyorgy "Gyurka" Koves (Marcell Nagy) is a 14-year-old Jewish boy living in Hungary when the Nazi pogroms begin sweeping through the country. Gyura's father (Janos Ban) has his business taken away from him not long before he's taken away to a concentration camp, and as he's led away, Gyura agrees to his father's request to look after his stepmother while he's gone. However, Gyurka takes a bus rather than the train to work the following morning, believing it to be safer, but before it can reach its destination, police stop the vehicle and take the Jewish passengers into custody. Gyurka is sent to Auschwitz, but is later transferred to Buchenwald, and finally to Zeitz; at each stop the teenager is witness to greater and greater horrors, as different varieties of torture and violence are introduced with each passing day, until his emotions begin to wear away. When American troops finally liberate Zeitz, Gyurka has been shocked into a placid serenity, and when he returns to the wreckage that is Budapest, his ravaged body and ghostly calm go mostly overlooked by the other survivors attempting to rebuild. Sorstalansag (aka Fateless) was adapted from a novel by Imre Kertesz, a Nobel Prize-winning author who is himself a survivor of the Nazi death camps. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

At seventeen, Zoli is the oldest of four unsettled youths, whose condition mirrors that of their nation, which has been cast adrift from the communist moorings which, however unpopular, gave structure to its life. Of the rest, Attila is the most committed to criminality; Laci would be a misfit anywhere; and Csoma knows how to get things done, though he is the youngest, just ten years old. Most of their schemes are harmless, from the usual window-washing scam to some petty larceny. The appearance of an exotic-looking Romanian girl on the scene inspires all the boys to exert themselves to impress her, though she soon becomes Zoli's special girl. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi