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Three Hungarian Films at the 2007 Tribeca Film FestivalThe Hungarian Cultural Center is proud to announce that three Hungarian films were selected for this year’s festival. |  |
THREE HUNGARIAN FILMS at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival The Hungarian
Cultural Center
is proud to announce that three Hungarian films were selected for this year’s festival: Taxidermia directed by György Pálfi: Showcase Section (US Premiere) Miss Universe 1929 directed by Péter Forgács: World Documentary Competition Guest Of Life directed by Tibor Szemző: Discovery Section
ABOUT THE FILMS
Taxidermia This dark comedy spans three generations of men in a Hungarian
family: a depraved orderly, his obese son, and
A wildly inventive and often grotesque panoply of sordid characters engaging in almost indescribable acts, this dark comedy by György Pàlfi, the director of the acclaimed Hukkle, takes on no less than Hungary's difficult history, from the post-WWII era to the present. It's hard to imagine a more unusual and mordant telling of that past, as Pàlfi takes us through three generations of men in a deeply twisted family: a depraved and abused orderly living in post-war militaristic Hungary, his singularly illbegotten and massively obese son who is a champion soup eater during the Communist period, and a scrawny taxidermist grandson who contends with the country's present-day consumerist and capitalist tendencies. Brimming with images that range from hilarious to awe-inspiring to downright disgusting, including a fire-breathing penis, frighteningly large cats raised on margarine, and a remarkable variety and abundance of bodily fluids, Taxidermia gleefully delves deep into human (and animal) desires, reveling in its own excess while simultaneously lambasting how people treat each other, and themselves. Harnessing the power of his fantastic visual style to create a world of distortions, monstrosities and nasty surprises, Pàlfi offers a film that pushes the boundaries of tastefulness while relentlessly challenging the limits of imagination. With a soundtrack by acclaimed musician, DJ and producer Amon Tobin. US Premiere
Miss Universe 1929: Lisl Goldarbeiter, a Queen in Wien The bittersweet tale of Lisl Goldarbeiter, an unlikely beauty queen in early 20th Century Austria. 70 minutes The master of turning old amateur films into works of art, Péter Forgács returns to the Tribeca Film Festival after winning its 2005 Best Documentary Award for El Perro Negro. In his new film, faded home movies of the Viennese Miss Universe 1929 reveal a grand, truly larger-than-life love story that spans Austria, Hungary and America, as well as the elegant '20s, the Holocaust and the Communist era. ""Never a woman so beautiful has walked this earth,"" states Marci Tenczer of his love Lisl Goldarbeiter. Cousins on either side of the fading Austro-Hungarian empire-he in Szeged, Hungary; she in Vienna- they grew up linked by family and by the moving image, with Marci on one side of the camera and Lisl on the other. The beautiful Lisl became Miss Universe in 1929, traveling from Vienna to Texas and back again. Marci remained in Hungary, watching as anti-Semitism began to swell and as Europe began to fall apart, filming all the while. Their lives intertwine through the years, during World War II and finally in Hungary's Iron Curtain decades. Forgács excavates these memories from the tarnished images of Marci's home movies, shot between the 1900's and the 1980's. Within these stained, marked pictures lie a history of 20th-century Hungary, a document of Jewish life before and during the Nazi era, and, most unforgettably, the story of a love between two individuals. ""These film diaries tell us something about what we can no longer touch or feel,"" writes Forgács, ""and also show us the other side of the official history""-one where beauty, memory and love unite. Guest Of Life Explorer Alexander Csoma de Körös is perhaps one of the strangest characters in Hungarian scholarship. Guest Of Life traces the inner journey of one of the country's original pioneers. 79 minutes Cut-out animation and gorgeous landscape footage anchor this fascinating experimental documentary on Buddhism, Tibet and the lure of travel, based on the true-life tales (and some related fables) of a 19th-century Hungarian. A scholar of the Orient and fluent in thirteen languages, Alexander Csoma de Körös set out on foot from his native country in 1819 in search of the origins of Magyar culture. His destination: Tibet, via Iran, Afghanistan and India. Settling with monks in the Tibetan mountains, he discovered Buddhist scriptures and set about translating them, later creating a 40,000 word Tibetan dictionary that further exposed that culture to the wider world. The Dalai Lama named him a saint; his tomb, at the foothills of the Himalayas, is a place of pilgrimage. A veteran of the influential Béla Balázs Studio in Budapest, the great Hungarian composer Tibor Szemzö returns to his filmmaking roots with this delicate study of Csoma's travels and tales. Befitting his roots at the experimental-leaning Balázs studio, Szemzö delivers no ordinary documentary, but a wide-ranging examination of story-telling, rootlessness, and the human desire for exploration. Narrated in English by Susannah York, A Guest of Life merges journal entries with tall tales, and sepia-toned footage of the Tibetan landscape with brilliant cut-out animation, inspired by both Asian shadow-puppet theater and Central European stop-motion work. A visual poem more than a straightforward documentary, the film won the Director's Prize for Visual Expression at the 2006 Hungarian Filmweek, and earned a special mention at the 2006 Locarno International Film Festival. TO PURCHASE TICKETS · Purchasing tickets can be done online at www.tribecafilmfestival.org.
· Phone sales can be reached at 866 941 FEST. · Walk-up sales locations are listed at www.tribecafilmfestival.org. For further information, visit www.tribecafilmfestival.org or www.culturehungary.org. To contact the Hungarian Cultural Center call 212.750.4450 or write info@culturehungary.org.
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