After All the Dead Sing Again...
Concert documentary about a performance of Chasidic songs by composer Max/Miksa/Mihai Eisikovits.
72'
Hungary
IFFR 2023
Aged just 14, Solymosi Eszter vanished without a trace after having been sent on an errand on April 1, 1882. Soon, a rumour started to make the rounds in the village of Tiszaeszlár: a blood libel that Jews had killed the Christian servant girl. Paranoia grew when, more than two months later, the body of a drowned girl was brought out of the Tisza. At that point, voices in parliament were already crying out ferociously for the deportation of all Jews on Hungary’s soil.
On July 29, after a lengthy period of investigations, the last antisemitic trial in the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy began. It ended with the accused’s acquittal. The so-called Tiszaeszlár Affair had already been the subject of three fiction features: Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s Der Prozeß (1948), W. Lee Wilder’s The Vicious Circle (1948) and Erdély Miklós’s Verzió (1979). Judit Elek’s version is the most detailed and historically accurate – sticking close to the original court transcripts and sober in its presentation of a culture ready and willing to turn genocidal if given half a chance. And it’s not over yet.
– 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