Festival de Cannes 2010
Official Selection in Competition
Sarajevo Film Festival 2010 - Special Prize
Sevilla International Film Festival 2010 - Best Director, Best Cinematographer

In his early youth, an ambitious and workaholic director fathered a child. He has never ever seen him or taken care of him. One day, the boy, 17, appears and, unwillingly, commits monstrous actions. When finally father and son meet, the father/director has to face up to his responsibility, and tries to save his son. This is not an easy task.
Their future remains uncertain though a real encounter does happen between them.

"Une seule vérité en tout cas, dans ce jeu de glaces étudié : la douleur et ce qu'elle promet." - Albert Camus

Festival de Cannes 2008
Official Selection in Competition
International Critics' Prize (FIPRESCI)

Hungary/Germany

Director: Kornel Mundruczo

Co-author: Yvette Biro

This is an appalling truth of our existence: how much hatred and violence is repressed in plain, seemingly calm, common people. When difference and "otherness" cannot be accepted. The sudden contrast of destructive forces against the stillness of the blue water and the sky emphasizes the awful depth of the drama.

Festival de Cannes 2006
Official Selection at Un Certain Regard

Hungary/Germany

Director: Kornel Mundruczo

Co-writer: Yvette Biro

A perplexing adaptation of the Joan of Arc legend: a junky, a frail girl finding herself in a hospital, becomes the angel/demon of the patients by offering her fine body to heal them. Her scandalous behavior arouses the hatred of the doctors and nurses and they decide to condemn her to death, throwing the body to the trash.
Performed in the form of an opera, the stylization enhances the defying, daring vision.

Saramago’s highly acclaimed novel is the basis of this "romantically magic" fable.
Because of the innocent actions of five brave people, a fantastic, inexplicable geological event occurs: the Iberian peninsula breaks off the European continent and it is impossible to prevent it. The break threatens to bring about a terrible disaster: the blowing up of the earth. The mystery brings people together and love, friendship, discord and solidarity keep men and women on the move.

Miraculously, the final explosion will be avoided, however, the human experience, with the moral, emotional richness that it entails, remains fabulously symbolic.

The ancient classical Electra myth has been adapted to partially recent circumstances. The role of Aigistos, the father’s murderer, is emphasized as a tyrant who is the enemy of the people. Electra is waiting for Orestes. With the help of her brother, she will finally kill him, but retribution will occur…

Hundreds of corpses cover the ground when, at the end, Electra and Orestes are symbolically taken up by a red helicopter to a more righteous and imaginary future.

In 1890, some peasant revolt took place, violently expropriating the landlords’ estates. It all happened as a collective ceremony, the ferocious acts were not exempt of solemn, folkloric celebration. They dared to rise up against all the ruling powers, including the church, while socialist prayers and psalms accompanied the actions.

Unsurprisingly, the military finally set about to kill all the rebels, yet never ceasing the choreography of the music and dance. However, the films closes, ending with a symbolic action in wich the lead takes her gun bound with a red ribbon and fires it toward the sky…

After the repressed and short-lived revolution of 1919, the film presents the era of the "white terror" when the obsessed right-wing leaders and priests manipulate and condemn the ex-revolutionary reds, soldiers and women to death.

The new oppressive power has its symbolic representatives: priests, officers in uniform, humiliated innocents… Military and religious heroes play their murderous roles.

The unusual intricately choreographed mythological tale creates poetic, epic unity in this fragmented story. At the end, both the "vicious" and the voluntary martyrs are burned on a spectacular stake.

The film was made in the year of student unrests, and deals with a power-game between young revolutionary activists and Catholic students, all playing out the "classical" Stalinist methods and rituals. The fight with the enemy quickly changes into an interior one. Punishment and excommunication for those who are out of line, go hand-in-hand with the "class struggle".

Music and dance appear as an important means of expression. The structure of the film is circular; without any final relief, suggesting that nothing was ever learned during the revolutionary process of "making history".