Made with the tenderness and intimacy of a Truffaut film, Apa is one of the most lyrical films of the Hungarian New Wave, and the winner of prizes in Moscow and New York. The subjective camera of István Szabó flies on the wings of a child’s imagination, as the movie-mad little boy weaves an entire myth around his father, lost at the end of the war, in the style of various film genres and newsreels and constructed from a handful of memories and objects: sometimes he sees him as a heroic partisan, sometimes a wise leader of the people, sometimes a resistance fighter hiding the sick in a hospital or a famous doctor inventing a new medicine. Through the experiences and emotions of the little boy, then growing into a university student, a traumatic period of dictatorship is evoked: Auschwitz and the Jewish question, 1956, defection and the contradictions of the prevailing socialism; the story of the orphanhood and precarious existence of a fatherless generation. Among other things, the secret behind the lyricism of Szabó’s film is that the objects and the “surviving” city all but take on lives of their own as equal participants in the drama alongside the immediate protagonists (András Bálint, Katalin Sólyom).

Presented by: Palace of Arts, MaNDA