Known for Acting
"Budapest Tales" is about a group of people (consisting of Szabo regular Andras Balint along with Ildiko Bansagi and Karoly Kovacs) who find a broken down tram while trying to go to the city. The people band together and try to get the tram back on the train tracks and head towards the city. Along this journey the passengers encounter many people who join them on the tram. What started out as only a handful of people has now turned into a small village. As the people travel on to the city each person takes on certain roles and through the course of time these roles will change. Some people fall in love, others out of love, and a few even die. But life goes on. The people keep the tram going hoping to reach Budapest.
In 1944 Budapest, one of a group of four friends poses a hypothetical moral question to the others, an act that will unexpectedly alter their lives forever.
This film describes the narrator's childhood, the years before and after the Hungarian Soviet Republic, in a burlesque and fabulous style and with the humour of a child's fantasy.
A story of two young people in Hungary, Jancsi and Kata. First they are good friends, later lovers. Soon after the 1956 Revolution Kata leaves Hungary, Jancsi stays there. After 10 years Jancsi is allowed to visit Kata in France, their love is reborn, but after a short, very happy period Jancsi has to return to Hungary and their love fades as years have gone by.
Emilia Odor is a young, seventeen year old girl. She end up in a rural girl institute, which has strict rules, a hypocrite faculty and she soon starts to rebel against it. Her schoolmates support her until then the manager announce a competition among the students: the most deserving student will participant in the millenial festival in Budapest.
Persuaded by the janitor's wife, a lively, but lonesome old woman, who is only attached to the world through her cherished objects and memories, decides to exchange her two-room apartment for a smaller one. For a little while her everyday life is changed. She meets and entertains new people every day.
A governor of Tsarist Russia throws a punch at striking workers. Many die as the governor looks on dutifully. From that moment on, he feels he has sinned against the people and expects to be killed too. Despite all the precautions taken by the chief of police, the governor cannot escape his fate, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth - the principle of talio is fulfilled.
The dramatically dense film takes place in workers' surrounding in the sixties. It raises the newspaper article serving as the basis for the short story to be a model: in a plastic factory fire breaks out causing enormous damages.
The beginning shows Hungary devastated by the war and the postwar reconstruction with its communist government. Our hero (played first by Dániel Erdély and later, as a young man, by András Bálint) is clearly determined to find out what he can about his father who died young. All he knows is that he was a doctor and perhaps he was an honored victim of fascism. He never really finds out but his relationship with his mother, his friends and his Jewish girlfriend will make him totally independent of this need to find all about Apa or Father.
Mihai Toth worked for forty years as a watchman in a timber warehouse. On his last watch, there was a fire: the warehouse burned to the ground. The damage amounted to one and a half million forints. It was a terrible blow to Mihai, who had worked honestly all his life. Suddenly it turns out that Mihai has won one and a half million forints in a lottery. Wanting to save his good name, he wants to deposit this sum in the state treasury. But it turned out to be not so easy: the cause of the fire has not been established and Mihai's guilt has not been proved. That's why nobody had the right to take money from him. For a long time Mihai wandered from one institution to another with a request to accept money from him, but everything was in vain. Then the old man tried a trick...
