Müpa Film Club

Music Till Death Do Us Part

“What am I without music?” sang Péter Máté, and it is a sentiment we can fully identify with. The new season of the Müpa Film Club has the kind of music as its focus that inspired the inception of a number of films of era-defining significance. Once again, our audience has a wonderful selection to pick from in 2026. As part of the screenings, Lars von Trier’s powerfully elemental melodrama Dancer in the Dark, which achieved huge success starring Björk, will be joined by György Szomjas's 1981 cult film Kopaszkutya (Bald Dog) on the Auditorium’s big screen. The authentic American vibe is brought to life by, among other offerings, Ralph Bakshi’s animated feature American Pop and Robert Altman's Nashville, but, of course, the outrageous parody of The Rocky Horror Picture Show could not be ignored, and the same goes for All That Jazz. The icing on the cake is the bewilderingly diverse and captivating Moulin Rouge!, where the performances of Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor ensure there won’t be a dry eye in the house.

Before and after the screenings, the film critic András Réz’s open-ended conversations, full of fascinating details and behind-the-scenes secrets, will help viewers immerse themselves even more deeply into the films. The discussions are conducted in Hungarian.

Come and join us!

It Only Hurts When I Laugh

Excerpts from the history of Hungarian film comedies and satires

We should make it clear right from the start: comedy is not a genre in itself. It’s more of a box into which we loosely toss any film that makes us laugh. Of course, we can try to group comedies together based on the type of laughter they induce. Such a classification scheme would yield ‘smiling films’, ‘laughing films’, ‘laughing-out-loud films’, ‘giggling films’ and so on. This approach seems rather imprecise, though. What we laugh at, what we find funny, varies quite a lot. It depends on the era, the culture, the community – and even the viewer’s current mood. We find different things funny in a silent burlesque film than we do in a rom-com, and we laugh differently at a satire than we do at a parody. It would take a long time to list each category. This new series from the Müpa Film Club celebrates ninety years of Hungarian film comedies. It promises to be a journey of discovery through time, and a great adventure. Filmmakers and directors always need to understand their era and their audience well enough to make their jokes hit the mark. The film club, on the other hand, is an opportunity to explore how our views, prejudices and values have changed over the decades.

The first three films in the series – Pesti mese (Tales of Budapest, 1937), A csodacsatár (The Miracle Striker, 1956/1957) and Mici néní két élete (Auntie Who Was Respectable, 1963) – testify to the fact that even though the language of Hungarian film did not undergo any fundamental changes over the course of those 26 years, everything else did. Revealed behind the comedic characters, the situational humour, the amusing dialogues and the gags is our world at that time, along with its doubts and questions. And there will be things we can still laugh about today.