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 \u2014 Roj\u00e1l, Kigler and Cs\u00f6m\u00f6r \u2014 meet on Saturday nights at Moszkva t\u00e9r, 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, Roj\u00e1l’s father gets hold of the literature paper, and the utterly hopeless Kigler is passed in maths anyway. Meanwhile Roj\u00e1l 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.<\/p>\n
The film was Ferenc T\u00f6r\u00f6k’s university thesis film. He studied at the University of Theatre and Film Arts in the directing class S\u00e1ndor Sim\u00f3 started in 1995 \u2014 the same class as Szabolcs Hajdu, Gy\u00f6rgy P\u00e1lfi, Di\u00e1na Gro\u00f3 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 t\u00e9r was the first of them to really find an audience.<\/p>\n
There is a very concrete explanation for why it became a cult film. Much of the dialogue was improvised \u2014 Erzsi P\u00e1pai 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 J\u00e1nos K\u00e1d\u00e1r, the reburial of Imre Nagy \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
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 t\u00e9r 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 Tam\u00e1s Z\u00e1nyi, the colour work from the original picture negative was led by cinematographer D\u00e1niel Garas, and Ferenc T\u00f6r\u00f6k himself was present at the supervision. It is a rare piece of luck: the film was put right by the people who made it.<\/p>\n
At the 2001 Hungarian Film Week the film won both the Best First Film prize and the Audience Award, and Erzsi P\u00e1pai won Best Supporting Actress; the directing prize came from Antwerp. A hundred and twenty thousand people saw it in cinemas \u2014 and at least one generation has grown up since, quoting it.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 \u2014 Roj\u00e1l, Kigler and Cs\u00f6m\u00f6r \u2014 meet on Saturday nights at Moszkva t\u00e9r, collect the addresses of that night’s parties, head up into the hills, drift from one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":35241,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n