After All the Dead Sing Again...
Concert documentary about a performance of Chasidic songs by composer Max/Miksa/Mihai Eisikovits.
72'
Hungary
IFFR 2023
A couple in love, but sadly married to other partners. What is to be done? Judit Elek’s delayed second fiction feature (after an enforced silence due to her iced Martinovics project), and her first one to screen at IFFR (after her cinéma vérité epic On the Field of God in 1972-73, IFFR 1976 and A Commonplace Story, IFFR 1976).
Furious energies are at work here: people hiss and holler truths and insults at each other in a world that seems to consist solely of perennially dirty and derelict houses and apartments. Some of the damage, like a clock that stopped when someone died, has a symbolic dimension for the characters; others look as if the set designer thought that a lack of cleaning best represented the desired effect. Underwear suggests urges as well as a disinterest in hiding them, cold spaghetti that there’s more to life than eating and keeping the human machine going.
One could think of filmmaker John Cassavetes, only his works look tame and well behaved in comparison with this descent into a relationship’s demise – more from the tired inertia of a society that has lost all direction and sense of purpose than any ill will.
– Olaf Möller
IFFR 2023
Programme IFFR 2023
Judit Elek (1937) is among world cinema’s most uncompromising figures. Beloved by IFFR founder Huub Bals, yet to this day little known in wider circles, Elek made both fiction and documentary films that are almost brutally personal, reflecting as much the history of her native Hungary as her own trauma-riddled life. International Film Festival Rotterdam is honoured to present the most complete retrospective so far of an auteur whose works and wisdom are needed today as urgently as ever.
Read more about this programmeConcert documentary about a performance of Chasidic songs by composer Max/Miksa/Mihai Eisikovits.
72'
Hungary
IFFR 2023
Film à clef of Judit Elek's teenage years in 1950s Budapest, between Stalinist rule and first longings.
110'
Hungary
IFFR 2023
Part two of Judit Elek’s Istenmezején documentary, where relationships with locals get both tighter and more ambivalent.
104'
Hungary
IFFR 2023