Moscow Square

Spring 1989. The country is on the brink of change, and everything is improvised. Petya is turning eighteen and facing his final exams. He and his friends — Rojál, Kigler and Csömör — meet on Saturday nights at Moszkva tér, collect the addresses of that night's parties, head up into the hills, drift from one party to the next, and come back to the square at dawn for a breakfast hamburger. Graduation is followed by a chaotic exam season: the post-1945 history questions have been abolished, Rojál's father gets hold of the literature paper, and the utterly hopeless Kigler is passed in maths anyway. Meanwhile Rojál offers Petya a share in a train-ticket forgery business. In come the money, the girls, the red Zhiguli and life with a capital L.

The film was Ferenc Török's university thesis film. He studied at the University of Theatre and Film Arts in the directing class Sándor Simó started in 1995 — the same class as Szabolcs Hajdu, György Pálfi, Diána Groó and others, the class that stayed together after their teacher's closing line ("Well, that's the end of the string") as the Madzag Film Society, and that within a few years changed what a Hungarian film looked like. Moszkva tér was the first of them to really find an audience.

There is a very concrete explanation for why it became a cult film. Much of the dialogue was improvised — Erzsi Pápai said in an interview that the absence of a script only made the scenes more lifelike. That is why nearly every line is simultaneously authentic and funny, and why so many of them became catchphrases. The handheld camerawork, the hamburgers with pickled vegetables, the one-forint ice cream and the red Zhiguli bring back the feel of an era. On the television in the background are reports of the Chain Bridge clashes, the death of János Kádár, the reburial of Imre Nagy — the fall of the regime is happening throughout, and nobody inside the frame is paying it any attention. That is the film's real subject: that even alongside the largest moments of history, what we actually live through is what happens to us.

The print now screening was produced in the Hungarian National Film Fund's long-term restoration programme, launched in 2017. Until then, only scratched prints and low-detail SD copies of Moszkva tér existed. The work was carried out by the Hungarian Film Laboratory under the direction of the Hungarian National Film Archive, with the Hungarian Society of Cinematographers; the sound was restored by Tamás Zányi, the colour work from the original picture negative was led by cinematographer Dániel Garas, and Ferenc Török himself was present at the supervision. It is a rare piece of luck: the film was put right by the people who made it.

At the 2001 Hungarian Film Week the film won both the Best First Film prize and the Audience Award, and Erzsi Pápai won Best Supporting Actress; the directing prize came from Antwerp. A hundred and twenty thousand people saw it in cinemas — and at least one generation has grown up since, quoting it.