Known for Acting
Benedek is a young football fan who will soon have to decide whether to to follow a team for the rest of his life or walk his own path.
1942. Owing to a stolen mink coat, Süti, the young poet and journalist, gets acquainted with Katalin, the idolated singer. Before being drafted to labour service, he shows the actress the song he composed for her, entitled Smouldering Cigarette.
Szomszédok was a Hungarian television series, occasionally called the Hungarian Dallas, that ran from 1987–1999 and produced 331 episodes, airing its grand finale on December 31, 1999. The series was a soap opera, dealing with the lives of ordinary people, living and working in or around an average lakótelep. Its characters were explored, over time, in equal depth: ranging from elderly pensioners, busy middle aged professionals, up-and-coming young people, and children growing into their teens. Many consider Szomszédok to be the definitive Hungarian television series, being a period piece of sorts that covers the last few years of the communist era, the rendszerváltozás, and nearly a decade of the new market economy Hungary thereafter.
In this somewhat uneven political satire, good revolutionaries have overthrown a totalitarian state riddled with corruption on all levels when a truly naive bureaucrat (Boguslaw Linda) is placed on a jury that will judge the results of a history competition. Once on the jury, the young bureaucrat starts looking into the past himself and gets embroiled in a labyrinth. The past may well be unclear because recent leaders have certain facts that need to be kept buried. Filmmaker Janos Kovacsi borrows characteristics from revolutions in the Eastern European block (1950s-1980s) to create this post-revolutionary society with an idealist commander (Ferenc Zenthe) meant to lead them. A clue as to what happens next lies in the opening scene -- the funeral of the commander who has given his life for his cause. Ironically, Kovacsi undoubtedly faced censorship on this film. That would not only account for some uneven narration, but it adds a dimension of reality to the topic at hand.
