Péter Barbalics

Dear Elza!

End of 1942, Ukraine, eastern front. The Private Lombos (Gábor Makray), a soldier loyal to his homeland, whose only desire as a freshman is to see his young wife again, serves here. However, due to an administrative error, he misses the train heading home. He thinks it can’t get any worse, but the real hell only begins. Educated young teacher, who speaks 3 languages, desperately fulfills his duty, takes up arms again, and marches on the Eastern Front. He is wounded in an attack and survives the night behind enemy lines in a pit. This is when he meets a mysterious old man (Tamás Varga), and this meeting changes everything. The old man's words shake his unbroken faith in his military family and homeland. At dawn, Russian soldiers find them, and Lombos is captured and then caught among the “tramplers”. The old man then also appears among the enemy's ranks, walks in the shadows, and tries to keep the young soldier alive at all costs with his advice.

Fateless

An Hungarian youth comes of age at Buchenwald during World War II. György Köves is 14, the son of a merchant who's sent to a forced labor camp. After his father's departure, György gets a job at a brickyard; his bus is stopped and its Jewish occupants sent to camps. There, György find camaraderie, suffering, cruelty, illness, and death. He hears advice on preserving one's dignity and self-esteem. He discovers hatred. If he does survive and returns to Budapest, what will he find? What is natural; what is it to be a Jew? Sepia, black and white, and color alternate to shade the mood.

The Luzhin Defence

Based upon the novel by Vladimir Nabokov, a chess grandmaster travels to Italy in the 1920s to play in a tournament and falls in love.

Woyzeck

Lajos Kovács (WINGS OF DESIRE) stars as the misused Woyzeck, who ekes out a miserable existence sweeping train tracks, running errands for a bullying army captain and acting as a human guinea pig for a local doctor with ideas about free will. When his common-law wife begins an affair with a local cop, Woyzeck's pocket Bible and near-starvation diet point him on a downward spiral of twisted redemption.

We Never Die!

In 1960s Hungary, an introverted teenager’s life is turned upside down by a few days in the company of his coat hanger salesman uncle: a roguish charmer with a zest for life and a weakness for horse racing and women.