The series of digital screenings presented by the Palace of Arts and the Hungarian National Digital Archive and Film Institute (MaNDA) in the autumn/winter programme of Müpa Cinema explore the many guises in which sexual desire, eroticism and nudity have been portrayed in the history of Hungarian film. Is Eros really pulling the strings here? When are women seen unclothed, and when are men? Do erotic scenes in Hungarian films convey a zest for life? How can the medium of film cope with the text of erotic prose? What is erotic: full nudity, a mere shadow appearing on the wall, or a silk slip slowly pulled up over a suspender belt? What is the nature of our love culture, and how does it relate to the depiction of reality in films? What use has Hungarian film made of nudity other than in an erotic context? Is it possible to make "love films” today? These are some of the questions that András Réz's film club seeks to answer.

Péter Esterházy wrote his fictitious confessions Seventeen Swans under the pseudonym Lili Csokonai in 1987. From this work of fiction that deals with sensual existence and combines both the gaudy and archaic, András Sólyom fashioned a diary-like erotic melodrama, at its centre the passionate, unrequited first love of an orphan girl starved of affection. The film tells its story in an imaginary, hallucinatory style of aestheticized pornography, looking back from out of the shadow of the shot lover. The unrestrained, erotic radiance and beauty of the student actress Dorka Gryllus and the dynamism of Attila Kaszás display the film in an unusual light today.

Presented by: Palace of Arts, MaNDA