Visszatérés – Retrace (digital director's cut)

  • 86'
  • Hungary
  • 2019

Judit Elek’s so-far last fiction feature is a curious mix of elements.

It started out as an attempt to adapt Marguerite Duras’ 1960 novel Dix Heures et demie du soir en été, and the story of a couple with a teenage daughter driving through a foreign land still forms the narrative backbone of Retrace. It then got augmented with elements from Miklós Mészöly's 1979 novella Szárnyas lovak, in particular the question of how two people can react differently to the same event. Eventually, it turned into the story of an immigrant returning with her family from her new home in Sweden to the 1980s Romania of the Ceaușescus, and a parallel narrative set partly in the past of her childhood friend, who collaborated with the regimes. Ultimately it found its final shape when Elek added some aspects of her own family history – the gruesome fate of her sister Vera, who was murdered in a concentration camp after being abused as a prostitute for the guards.

The result is one of Elek’s most cerebral works: a mosaic of interlocking narratives in some half-a-dozen languages where home is a melancholic, potentially deadly illusion, and exile maybe the destiny of every decent human being.

 

Olaf Möller

  • 86'
  • Hungary
  • 2019
Director
Judit Elek
Countries of production
Hungary, Romania, Sweden
Year
2019
Festival Edition
IFFR 2023
Length
86'
Medium
DCP
Languages
Hungarian, Romanian, English
Producers
Judit Elek, Johan Fälemark, Peter Hiltunen
Production Companies
Danielfilm Studio, Artis Film, Illusion Film & Television
Sales
Danielfilm Studio
Screenplay
Judit Elek
Cinematography
László Berger
Editor
Zoltán Varga
Production Design
Csaba Damokos
Sound Design
György Kovács
Music
László Melis
Cast
Kathleen Gati, András Demeter, Philip Zandén, Sarah Clark, Manna Kenderesi
Director
Judit Elek
Countries of production
Hungary, Romania, Sweden
Year
2019
Festival Edition
IFFR 2023
Length
86'
Medium
DCP
Languages
Hungarian, Romanian, English
Producers
Judit Elek, Johan Fälemark, Peter Hiltunen
Production Companies
Danielfilm Studio, Artis Film, Illusion Film & Television
Sales
Danielfilm Studio
Screenplay
Judit Elek
Cinematography
László Berger
Editor
Zoltán Varga
Production Design
Csaba Damokos
Sound Design
György Kovács
Music
László Melis
Cast
Kathleen Gati, András Demeter, Philip Zandén, Sarah Clark, Manna Kenderesi

Programme IFFR 2023

Focus: Judit Elek

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 programme