Awakening

Budapest in the 1950s. Kati is barely a teenager yet forced to fend for herself – her mother is dead, her father working far away in an iron foundry. And yet, she’s not alone: her mother’s ghost visits once in a while, when invoked by need or yearning, while more earthly characters like a young bookseller start to fill spaces in her life.

It seems telling that Judit Elek would follow her first fiction feature on a Jewish subject (Memories of a River) with one deeply rooted in her own life – so deep, in fact, that she sometimes points towards Awakening when she tries to explain something about her teenage years. It is a work of fiction, but most of Awakening is based on Elek’s memories of the Stalinist years. This is especially evident when it comes to the details, including the films Kati watches, which were her own early favourites.

Aesthetically, it’s markedly different from her big screen works up until then: the documentary-imbued nervous drive that was already on the retreat in Memories of a River is gone, and has been replaced by a calmly composed, visually rich classicism as if she now needed a certain rigour to make her own story approachable and applicable to everybody.

– Olaf Möller