After All the Dead Sing Again...
Concert documentary about a performance of Chasidic songs by composer Max/Miksa/Mihai Eisikovits.
72'
Hungary
IFFR 2023
There’s little by way of a story to Judit Elek’s feature debut The Lady from Constantinople – we spend some time with a lonely elderly lady changing houses and walking around town. And yet, how rich this film is, as she finds herself time and again in weird, awkward, outright surreal situations, including a funeral on a rooftop and an impromptu party full of strangers.
Elek shot vast parts of the film on streets among unsuspecting ordinary folk who got dragged into the film’s fiction by legendary actor Kiss Manyi whenever she started to comment on things they said, for instance. Some added vérité mileage was provided by the work of handheld camera genius Elemér Ragályi, whose leanly muscular style would soon grace gems as different as István Gaál’s poetic study on the functioning of dictatorial structures, Magasiskola (1970) and György Szomjas’s romantic, revolutionary steppe Western, Talpuk alatt fütyül a szél (1975). A revelation!
– 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