In 2008 and 2009 racist death squads in Hungarian villages killed six possibly eight Romanys. Houses were burned and dozens of Romanys injured. Fliegauf captures the trapped and helpless feelings of a Romany family in the racially charged atmosphere of the village as they go about their daily lives.
A gypsy family next door has just been murdered. We watch as Mari a cleaning woman played by Katalin Toldi, and her two children, Anna, played by Gyongyi Lendvai, and her little brother Rio, Lajos Sarkany, get up and begin their day. This unremarkable Romany family tries to carry on as usual and Fliegauf follows them with his hand held camera through the ordinary details of their day. The family lives in a slum and barely survives but in many ways they are just like any other ordinary family.
Fliegauf has never been known for giving the audience an easy ride and here too audiences will have to show patience and endurance to reap the rewards of this important acclaimed but slow moving and - with the exception of the ending – for the most part uneventful film. All the characters are played by first time actors and the film looks like a documentary.
Fliegauf is not interested in reconstructing the series of pogroms against the Romanys that led to this tragedy. Speaking at the press conference he said: “I wanted to make a film that was not the same as the police investigation. The film is fiction, but the murders were real and hideous crimes.” He is interested is building a picture of the mood and atmosphere that leads to such acts and the ordinary humanity of a single family.
The village where the family lives is squalid and surrounded by garbage. Fliegauf said this was because it was shot in a small village where there is no garbage collection and everything was starting to rot. The metaphor is obvious.
Fliegauf not only directed the film but also wrote the script and did the casting and production design. This is the work of an auteur. He said that the idea came to him as an image when he woke in the night and saw images of the machine guns used for the crimes flickering in the night.
Flieguaf follows this family as they go about their normal daily routine and the small indignities and cruelties that they are subjected to. One particularly effective scene is when the girl Anna has to run to catch a bus because the bus driver has stopped far beyond the stop just to make her have to run unnecessarily to catch it.
The director slowly builds a dossier of these everyday scenes that leads inevitably to the film’s final and dramatic end.
Director Bence Fliegauf
Cast: Lajos Sarkany, Katalin Toldi, Gyongyi Lendvai, Gyorgy Toldi
