Flying cakes, speeded-up characters scurrying around, but above all cinema and football! Iván Mándy and Pál Sándor’s most influential human story became a cult film akin to The Witness (A tanú), chock full of enchanting images, maxims about the beauties and gifts of life, and those great moments of rising from defeat. “We need a team!” announces the cock-eyed, big-hearted Ede Minarik, the laundryman who lives “on the edge of town”, who – in the absence of money – uses his own enthusiasm to fire up the team he has recruited one by one while being constantly harassed by bailiffs and football agents. The world of the 1920s is conjured to life by the director and his cinematographer Elemér Ragályi in the style of period silent films, employing the tools of burlesque and pantomime seen through a distorted wide-angle lens. “Every day Garas arrived in his over-washed pink shirt, looking very young. He went into the changing room and emerged as Ede Minarik. How did he do it? I don’t know.” (Pál Sándor)

Presented by: Palace of Arts, MaNDA