Ica is still in her prime, but fading. The 65-year-old lady, witty and with a dry sense of humour, increasingly stumbles over memory gaps, though the city offers her a safe banister through daily life. Her daughter Judit patiently tries to fit Ica’s care into her working life and village idyll. Via stops at a dice game, a furniture store and the “Café Alzheimer” she looks for a shared home suited to the different needs of two closely linked women.

André Eckardt

When you’re brooding over depressing thoughts, question a lot and are surrounded by people stuck in their banal, everyday routines, you can get very lonely. In his strange odyssey by streetcar, taxi and ship Milán Kopasz opens up the interior world of a frustrated man. With a furious monologue, pixilation and cubist-looking collages, Kopasz creates a vivid portrait of alienation.

Nadja Rademacher

János is in his early twenties when he is conscripted by the Ukrainian government. His family are part of the Hungarian minority in the country. Many flee to the EU to escape conscription, but János chooses military service. László Csuja follows him in the weeks before he sets out on the 1,500 km trip to the frontline, he is there when János returns to his family for the holidays and welcomes him home when his term of service has ended. He also uses material János himself recorded with a smartphone camera when he was a soldier – glimpses of life on the base.

It’s no coincidence that the nine months of the title evoke the duration of an average pregnancy – “Nine Month War” is the portrait of a development, perhaps not from embryo to baby but from boy to man, depending on one’s definition of man. János, the boy, seems equally strong and naive, is surrounded by the love of his fiancée and an ever-present mother. János, the man returned by the Ukrainian army after his service, is more inaccessible, sometimes rude. Resistance has formed against the main female protagonists in his life. János is preoccupied with himself, sitting around in semi-darkness and playing with his hands, looking after the soldiers who come to the kiosk where he works with an impenetrable expression.

Carolin Weidner

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Nominated for the MDR Film Prize

“Házibuli” is Hungarian for house party. Sometimes meticulously prepared by the host – but the flat will nonetheless be in ruins afterwards. At first everyone is well-behaved, sipping from their glasses and doing small talk. Then the band starts to play: frenetic meetings of mouths, glasses and more and more guests turn into orgiastic dancing. But the morning is the time of hangovers. This diploma film from Budapest’s Moholy Nagy University celebrates the joys of transformation.

Nadja Rademacher

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Nominated for mephisto 97.6 Audience Award

A black flock of birds look like streaks of coal drawn on the grey sky. Bare branches raise their fingers; the meadows are covered with frost. Nature is the scene of a human drama that could definitely be avoided, because it marks an artificial border: the one between Hungary and Serbia, the external EU border. Refugees from Africa and Asia try to cross it every day. No one knows how many of them make it. It’s winter now and nature is a hostile territory. A Serbian priest tries to find the refugees. He helps with clothes and food, which is a punishable offence. Volunteer border guards who co-operate with the police are patrolling the other side. They, too, are trying to find people while they talk about how the borders used to be safer.
The priest and the civilian patrols have one thing in common: they act out of conviction, not because they have to. The film looks at those border activities from two perspectives and exposes the fault line that runs between them. We peer through bushes at inhospitable hiding holes with the priest, through binoculars and thermal cameras at small running dots with the border guards. “Those people know no obstacles”, says one of the guards. Meanwhile, the ones he talks about are struggling against freezing to death. National borders are also boundaries of communication.
Lars Meyer