István Szabó Retrospective: Central European Present and Past in Film

PHYSICAL PROGRAMME

At 2.30 pm Workshop
Conducted by Prof. Balazs Varga, Associate Professor of Film Studies at ELTE, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary

At 6.30 pm    Father (Apa/Hungary)
(88 min; 1966; dvd; Hungarian with English subtitles)
Director: István Szabó

Recipient of the Special Prize of the Jury, Locarno International Film Festival 1967; Grand Prix, Moscow International Film Festival 1967; Golden Moon Award for Best Screenplay, Faro Island Film Festival 1966; and CEC Award, Valladolid International Film Festival 1968

After his father is killed in World War II, a young Hungarian boy named Tako concocts a fantasy image of the parent he never really knew.

Essentially a coming of age story told in two parts, the first half of this film is set in 1949 and deals with young Tako (Daniel Erdely) as a schoolboy whose father (Miklos Gabor), a doctor, died at the end of WW2.  Being too young to really remember his father, the boy invents and imagines stories about him, so he becomes a kind of mythological figure in his mind.  The second half of the film takes place in 1956 just before the Hungarian uprising, Tako (Andras Balint) is now a university student and a man who still struggles with the memories of his father and sets out to discover the man he really was.

A well-made story, quite moving but never over-sentimental that excels particularly in the various imagined heroic flashback scenes of the father, with Miklos Gabor doing a fine job in that role.  Hungarian film legend Andras Balint plays the older Tako brilliantly as a young man searching for the truth about his past.  

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