Az örökség

Uncle Árpi — his sons only ever call him the Boss — has lived alone for years, since losing the wife he spent more than fifty years with. That his entire savings have gone in recent months is something his two sons, Attila and Kristóf, only notice when the electricity is cut off over unpaid bills. From a man who lives as modestly as he does this is more than odd, and he refuses to say where a million and a half forints went. Eventually the sons get it out of him: he gave it to Hajnalka, a young woman who has had a hard life. The old man says he is in love. The sons say he is being conned. The longest night of their lives begins — and by the end Hajnalka turns up at the front door too.

The film's backstory is at least as interesting as its story. István Tasnádi began it eight years ago in Tamás Lengyel's kitchen: he brought the basic idea and a few scene sketches, and the actors he had invited improvised on them. From the rehearsals they shot a ten-minute short and applied for funding with it. After a few years it became clear that with this cast no state grant would be forthcoming — and Tasnádi could not imagine the film with any other actors. In his own words it had been a shared cause from the beginning, and he had nearly given up when the producers of I Went Running and Fell for You, György Kárpáti and Balázs Berta, stepped in alongside him, together with Dániel Herner.

So the film was made independently, with no direct state funding, on roughly a fifth of the budget of a comparable feature: the director, Zoltán Mucsi, Tamás Lengyel, Áron Molnár and the cinematographer Sándor Csukás all worked for free. Shooting began in January, in the coldest days of the winter, and was finished in fourteen days — the final clap came in a snowstorm in the Danube Bend. The interiors were shot in the Monspart house, once the home of the orienteering world champion Sarolta Monspart. The producers themselves stressed that this arrangement is not a model but a necessity.

The cast draws on the strong middle generation of Hungarian acting and on its elders: Zoltán Mucsi, Áron Molnár, Tamás Lengyel, Viktória Staub, together with Dorottya Udvaros, László Mátray and Ákos Orosz. Sándor Csukás shot the film, Mano Csillag edited it, András Monori composed the score and Adrienn Antal-Fogel designed the sets.

István Tasnádi is one of the central figures of contemporary Hungarian playwriting and screenwriting, a winner of the József Attila and Balázs Béla prizes, and the writer of the cult series Aranyélet and Terápia as well as the films Made in Hungária and Nyugati nyaralás. As a director he previously made two television films, MEMO and Egy másik életben; Az örökség is his first for cinemas. It opens in Hungarian cinemas on 22 October.