Hedi Temessy Movies

Written and directed by Czech filmmaker Péter Bacsó, Hamvadó Cigarettavég is a romantic musical set in Budapest against the backdrop of war. Eszter Nagy-Kálózy stars as renowned lounge singer Katalin. In need of some new songs, Katalin meets Süti, a down-on-his-luck Jewish songwriter played by Péter Rudolf. At the same time, Katalin rekindles a relationship with an army general. Together, the three form a lasting bond that becomes one of their few assetts as the Nazis approach. The title, Hamvadó Cigarettavég, translates to Smouldering Cigarette. ~ Matthew Tobey, Rovi

Andras Suranyi directs this spare though poignant film recounting the last day of an old man's life. The film opens with an elderly couple making preparations for their morning routine. The wife makes her husband some tea, they walk to the park, and they visit a café before the husband has a sudden, fatal heart attack. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi

In this enigmatic film set in the late communist era, two Hungarian women whose husbands were killed in communist purges are on the French seashore with the son of one of them. The boy is recovering from some sort of ailment, and has permission to sojourn abroad. When the trio return to Hungary, they are given permission to start a charitable foundation to care for stray dogs. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

An Iranian girl living in Hungary discovers that her father is alive and living in Persia in this drama. Teenager Maria and her mother, a Hungarian, were forced to leave Iran when the Iran-Iraq war broke out. Maria is a freshman at Budapest's Economic Sciences University. There she learns that her father is alive and living in Tehran. Because her homelife is problematic, Maria decides to go to Persia to discover her roots and find her father. Maria begins to wear traditional Muslim clothing and begins fantasize about her forgotten homeland and her father. In the film, Iran is idealized. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

Two cursed sisters are haunted by familial ghosts in this Hungarian drama. Olga and Marta are finally able to return with their children to their family mansion, a rundown home recently occupied by the Communist Party. The widowed Olga finds herself sexually attracted to Marta's husband Viktor, an artist. Meanwhile, Marta is being haunted by her nanny's ghost. She also learns disturbing secrets about her wise uncle, Gabor. Reality and her memories soon intermingle, and trouble ensues. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

Eva is the wife of Tamas, and they have a very young child. As this romantic drama opens, they are celebrating the child's birthday. That same day, he meets an attractive woman through a friend of his grandmother. He has a tumultuous affair with her, which eventually drives Eva and her child to split with him entirely and move to Australia. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr began his career making social realist domestic dramas, similar to the work of John Cassavettes. The feature before Damnation, Almanac of Fall, showed Tarr moving toward a more visually stylized form of filmmaking. With Damnation, the first of his collaborations with novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Tarr adopts a formally rigorous style, featuring long takes and slow tracking shots of the bleak landscape that surrounds the characters. Shot in black-and-white, Damnation tells the story of Karrer (Miklos B. Szekely), a depressed man in love with a married woman (Vali Kerekes) who sings at the local bar, Titanik. The singer has broken off their affair, despite her profession of love for him. She wants to improve her life. She dreams of becoming famous, but she herself embodies all of Karrer's hopes and dreams. Karrer is offered smuggling work by Willarsky (Gyula Pauer), the bartender at Titanik. Despite his lack of other prospects, Karrer tries to haggle with Willarsky over his take. Karrer eventually decides to offer the job to the singer's husband, Sebastyen (Gyorgy Cserhalmi), who has fallen on hard times. This gets the husband out of the way for a while, but things don't go as Karrer plans with the singer. There's a big, drunken dance, which everyone in town attends (though one demented soul prefers to dance maniacally in the rain outside). Afterwards, one betrayal falls upon another, leaving Karrer in despair, alienated from all of humanity. This film laid the groundwork for Tarr's next collaboration with Krasznahorkai, Satantango, a seven-hour film which they spent years developing, and which many consider Tarr's masterpiece. ~ Josh Ralske, Rovi

This is a downbeat story of people frustrated by ordinary problems that builds to a destructive climax as two different stories are told in alternating segments and then brought together for a shattering finale. Sandor (Andor Lucats) is a factory worker who along with his co-workers has just received a bonus for an invention of theirs. The group celebrates at a local restaurant and as Sandor gets increasingly inebriated, his stress and frustrations with life reach a point where they're about to bubble over. He then leaves and goes to a nightclub. On the other hand, Karoly (Gyorgy Dorner) has long chaffed under the restrictions of his domineering mother. He and his girlfriend eventually decide to get married and for once in his life, Karoly is going to stand up on his own. But tragedy strikes the next day as he is heading to work. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

Possibly inspired by the existential play No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre, this story about five people living in close quarters in a small apartment conveys the same angst as Sartre's well-known story about the nature of hell. Like the 1962 movie version of the play, Oszi Almanach is also garishly lighted, with scenes red-tinted on one side and blue-tinted on the other. Close-ups show a dermatologist's interest in skin, an example of the kind of bizarre abstraction that underscores the alienation in this film. A single, older mother owns the apartment, where she is tended by a nurse who has brought along a presumed lover. The sick woman's son lives there too, constantly thinking about how to get his hands on his mother's money. The last member of this unhappy "family" is a former teacher now down on his luck and out of work. The three men and the nurse are dependent on the sick woman, on her money and her apartment, just as she is dependent on them. Yet these individuals are two-faced, scheming, and prone to anger. Unable to break away and leave, at the same time they find no solace in staying -- making a difficult two hours of misery for the average viewer to take on without a therapist. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

The Hungarian turmoil of the mid-1950s -- when more than 150,000 left the country and Soviet tanks rolled through the streets -- serves as a backdrop for this wisp of a story about an opera singer, his wives, his mother-in-law, and a 35-year-old man he takes under his wing. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

A supposed window dresser is really a thief by natural inclination and he comes up with several ingenious schemes to make money. In one robbery, he and a few accomplices steal a statue from a church, sell it for an exorbitant sum to a few West German citizens, then cause the West Germans' car to crash -- whereupon the thieves take back the statue and set it up in the church again. In another robbery, some jewels from an antique shop are hidden in a special, trick place inside a wooden table that the thief had sold to the shop. Once the jewels are safe in the table, the thief buys the table back and he leaves the shop with the hidden jewels, no problem. Basically, this seems to be a do-it-yourself instruction kit for anyone with sticky fingers. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

An incompetent school administrator bamboozles a crew of inspectors into thinking that his students are doing okay in this Hungarian comedy. Among his pedagogical inventions is a game called "spider football," in which students, moving along on their backsides, hands and feet, play a highly modified game of soccer. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi