10 great Hungarian films

The very welcome release of a Blu-ray box set of István Szabó’s riveting collaborations with Klaus Maria Brandauer (Mephisto, 1981; Colonel Redl, 1984; Hanussen, 1988) has turned the spotlight onto one of Europe’s more distinctive film cultures. 

Hungarian cinema’s long and distinguished history has now lasted well over a century. The silent era nurtured the early work of Sándor Kellner and Mihály Kertész (who would make their later careers in the UK and Hollywood as Alexander Korda and Michael Curtiz), and it thrived into the 1930s, at least locally. While it suffered under the successive mid-century depradations of Nazism and Stalinism, there was a spectacular revival post-1956, as more tolerant cultural policies nurtured the career of such wildly unclassifiable talents as Miklós Jancsó and Zoltán Huszárik, filmmakers whose sheer originality might have caused them to struggle in a more commercially-minded environment. As Jancsó himself ruefully admitted, it would have been impossible to create his vast widescreen epics, typically featuring hundreds of men and horses, if he’d had to pay for them individually; instead, he could borrow entire army detachments.

Into the 21st century, we’ve had the very different work of Béla Tarr and György Pálfi, with Pálfi’s latest film Hen, a live-action film with a chicken protagonist, being much acclaimed on the festival rounds.

In Britain in the 1960s and 70s, Hungarian cinema was regularly screened by London’s famous Academy cinema in Oxford Street (which was owned and run by Hungarians). That’s been a Marks and Spencer since the mid-80s, but in the last 20 years enterprising video labels, particularly Second Run, have been either reviving established classics or in some cases (Szindbád) giving them long overdue British premieres in English-friendly versions. Happily, they’ll be continuing to mine this exceptionally rich seam, as this top 10 only scratches the surface.

Director: István Szöts

The fact that there’s no official English title, with various alternative combinations assembled from “Men/People”, “in the/of the”, “Alps/Mountains” (the original is Emberek a havason), betrays how István Szőts’ film has been undeservedly pushed to film history’s fringes, despite its immense importance. For, when showcased at the 1942 Venice Film Festival, it was this film that had a seismic impact on the then future Italian neorealists, who recognised the kind of film that they themselves were itching to make.

Szőts’ depiction of a remote Transylvanian village is scrupulously, indeed ethnographically realistic, paying close attention to the villagers’ way of life at a time when industrialisation was having a cataclysmic impact on traditional professions and crafts, and when ancient pagan traditions still held as much sway as Christianity.

Human drama is injected via the story of a Hungarian woodcutter relocating to the village with his family, and initial tensions ultimately culminate in a somewhat melodramatic pile-up of tragedy upon tragedy, but it’s easy to see why the French critic Philippe Haudiquet compared Szőts with Alexander Dovzhenko, John Ford and Jean Renoir. Despite the acclaim, Szőts was only able to make one more feature, the similarly lyrical Song of the Cornfields (1947).

Director: Zoltán Fábri

Locally, this is one of the most beloved films ever made in Hungary, their equivalent of The Cranes Are Flying (1957) in the Soviet Union or Ashes and Diamonds (1958) in Poland, in that all three films completely upended expectations of what was possible within a notionally strictly circumscribed – indeed, very recently out-and-out Stalinist – national film culture. It was also a huge influence on younger Hungarian filmmakers.

Since it’s a melodrama about young lovers separated by parental disapproval, set against a backdrop of the ideological struggle between advocates of collective and private enterprise, it’s easy to see why production was greenlit, as on paper it must have sounded like a model Socialist Realist project.

But Zoltán Fábri injected a new lyricism into this stale-seeming material, never more so than in the scene that gives the film its title, when the lovers whirl round in a merry-go-round’s chain-suspended chairs, a sequence made all the more thrilling by the fact that Fábri and cinematographer Barnabás Hegyi shot it for real, without resorting to the usual back projection. Future acting giant Mari Törőcsik made her screen debut here at the age of 19, with Imre Soós as her would-be paramour.

Director: István Gaál

István Gaál spent two years studying at the Centro Sperimentale in Rome, and his feature debut duly shows the clear influence both of Italian neorealism and its more modernist offshoots, such as Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960). In fact, Current bears a strong resemblance to Antonioni’s film in its depiction of a group of friends whose lives are permanently altered when one of them, Gabi, mysteriously disappears during a riverside excursion.

The crucial difference is that they’re much younger than Antonioni’s characters, with some not yet out of their teens, and therefore are forced to grow up much faster than intended.  Each reacts to the disappearance in a different way, reflecting their own individual worldview (the group includes a biologist, a physicist and a sculptor), while collectively trying to make sense of what’s happened.

Gaál and cinematographer Sándor Sára contrive some stunning landscape shots in which an ever-flowing river looms large, and are equally inventive indoors, where objects are filmed in such extreme close-up that they become near-abstract studies of form and texture. Zoltán Huszárik was the assistant director, and would push Sára’s considerable image-making skills to the limit in Szindbád a few years later, this time in colour.

Director: Miklós Jancsó

One of Hungarian – and world – cinema’s supreme masters, Miklós Jancsó unveiled his mature style in his fourth feature: a setting dominated by the great featureless plain, or puszta, that sprawls across central Hungary, extended takes featuring elaborate choreography of camera and performers, and a greater interest in wider historical/political/psychological issues than in individuals.

In real life, the story of a band of 1848 revolutionaries being systematically tracked down by the authorities two decades later took place in claustrophobic dungeons. Conversely, Janscó favoured agoraphobia, with the action taking place in a stockade in the middle of nowhere, the horizon constantly visible but with no guarantee of reaching it; a man can be suddenly felled by a bullet seemingly coming out of nowhere. Each set-piece revolves around a different coercion method, with Jancsó focusing on psychological techniques used to disorientate and ultimately break prisoners into betraying their comrades.

For the next decade, the prolific Jancsó would refine his technique in such films as The Red and the White (1967), Silence and Cry (1968), Agnus Dei (1970) and Red Psalm (1972), but The Round-up was the breakthrough masterpiece, a film as uncompromisingly ‘Hungarian’ as the music of Béla Bartók, but just as unexpectedly accessible.

Director: Károly Makk

If Miklós Jancsó was the flamboyant ringmaster of Hungarian cinema, his near-contemporary Károly Makk favoured subtlety, introspection and a spare, unflowery style. Makk made dozens of films, many unseen outside Hungary, but Love is the one that cemented his international reputation, and it’s been a more or less permanent fixture on local 10-best lists ever since. 

It was particularly cathartic in Hungary for tackling the thorny topic of political dissidence during the Stalinist era and immediately thereafter, but could also be appreciated far more widely as an incisive commentary on the lies that people had to tell each other as a matter of necessity when trying to survive under totalitarianism.

Love starred two great Hungarian actresses of different generations, Lili Darvas and Mari Törőcsik, as a nonagenarian mother and her daughter-in-law, the latter attempting to make the former’s last months easier by inventing an alternative, far more successful life in America for her husband (regular Makk leading man Iván Darvas, no relation), whereas he’s actually a political prisoner serving a 10-year sentence. This also causes her to lose her job, sell off her valuables, and be placed under constant surveillance, something that understandably pushes her close to a breakdown.

Director: Zoltán Huszárik

The great visual poet of Hungarian cinema, Zoltán Huszárik made a disproportionately huge splash in 1965 with his rhapsodic short film Elégia, a wordless study of the relationship between horse and man that alone signalled an extraordinary talent. This was more than confirmed with his debut feature, instantly acclaimed as one of Hungarian cinema’s great classics, a stature that it retains to this day.

Once considered unfilmable (and untranslatable), Gyula Krúdy’s short stories about the turn-of-the-20th-century roué Szindbád typically consist of fleeting impressions rather than concrete narrative. The same is true of the film, in which Szindbád (Zoltán Latinovits, Hungary’s Marcello Mastroianni) attempts to live a life of unbridled hedonism and sensuality, dominated by beautiful women and mouthwatering food (the film’s restaurant scene is an all-timer), while becoming increasingly aware that he’s setting himself up to die alone and unloved.

To describe Szindbád as one of the most beautiful colour films in cinema history only sounds like hyperbole to those who haven’t seen it: the evidence is printed onto every ravishing frame. Cinematographer Sándor Sára’s already formidable technique was pushed to the absolute limit, and the fact that his onscreen credit is as prominent as that of Huszárik himself speaks volumes.

Director: Márta Mészáros

Márta Mészáros’s The Girl (1968) was the first Hungarian fiction feature to be directed by a woman, inaugurating a five-decade-plus career. However, she’d already amassed a substantial body of documentary work, a background that fuelled a keen curiosity about how people function either in everyday settings or at times of adversity. In her films, dialogue is often purely functional, with more attention paid to body language, while her lengthy, silent scrutiny of people’s faces anticipates the films of Béla Tarr.

Mészáros is perhaps best known for her autobiographical Diary trilogy (1984 to 1990), but the film that’s currently easiest to get hold of in the UK is her fifth feature, Adoption, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Like many Mészáros films, it’s a deceptively low-key drama about two women, 43-year-old Kata (Katalin Berek), conscious of a loudly ticking biological clock, and troubled teenager Anna (Gyöngyvér Vigh). Perhaps inevitably, it’s a two-way relationship, with Kata simultaneously trying to mould Anna in what she sees as an ideal direction, while quietly admiring her fiercely independent spirit – something amply possessed by her creator, who managed to forge a lengthy career within an industry not otherwise noted for championing female talent.

Director: István Szabó

Made immediately before his remarkable trilogy with Klaus Maria Brandauer, and one of his personal favourite films, István Szabó’s Silver Bear-winning sixth feature is an intensely claustrophobic study of the relationship between a pair of resistance activists in 1944 who for reasons of basic survival have to pretend to be a married couple (convincingly enough to stand up under interrogation), despite them initially being total strangers.

Neither Kata (Ildikó Bánsági) nor János (Péter Andorai) can trust anybody else, since a single word out of place from either of them could mean a call to the Gestapo, potentially leading to the execution either of themselves or someone else. Since they’re both married to other people whom they’re unable to contact, this relentless pressure plays havoc with their psychological make-up, the after-effects of which are scrutinised in mercilessly forensic detail.

The overwhelming majority of the running time comprises hushed conversations in dimly-lit rooms between just two or three people, but by the end almost every syllable is pregnant with intense emotional significance, culminating in a real gut-punch in the last two scenes. Szabó grew up under both Nazism and Stalinism and intimately knew what it was like living in a totalitarian environment.

Director: Béla Tarr

Although he made his debut a decade earlier, it was with 1988’s Damnation that Béla Tarr first unveiled his mature style, developed in collaboration with editor/partner Ágnes Hranitzky, composer Mihály Víg and screenwriter/occasional source novelist László Krasznahorkai, winner of 2025’s Nobel Prize for Literature. And Tarr newcomers might prefer to start with that, Werkmeister Harmonies (2000) or The Turin Horse (2011) before plunging headlong into his most monumental film.

Seven and a half hours long, Sátántangó (which translates as ‘Satan’s Tango’, the principle of the tango underpinning the film’s structure) is an apocalyptic fable set in a dilapidated collective farm whose desperate inhabitants come under the hypnotic spell of the visionary Irimiás (Víg), who may well be an absolute charlatan, but at least he’s offering some kind of future. 

Shot in black and white with shots typically lasting several minutes at a time (Tarr once quipped that the maximum length of a 35mm reel was a form of censorship), Sátántangó is the apotheosis of ‘slow cinema’, with minutes at a time devoted to silent trudging through rubbish-strewn streets and muddy fields. But, paralleling the hold that Irimiás has over the villagers, Tarr contrives to make it weirdly hypnotic.

Director: György Pálfi

One of the major Hungarian directors of the 21st century made his debut with this beguilingly original study of village life. The twist is that the human occupants are observed with the same detached, quizzical eye that pays similarly close attention to every other species, their various noises being stitched into a beguiling polyrhythmic aural quilt by sound designer Tamás Zányi. (The film’s title is onomatopoeic, referring to the gurgling coughs that emerge from old Uncle Cseklik’s throat as he sits on his doorstep to watch the world go by.)

With no verbal content to guide us (the film needs virtually no subtitles, until a couple of symbolic folksongs near the end), we have to rely on behavioural analysis, and it becomes increasingly clear that the village women have more in common with praying mantises than they do with the idealised image that their menfolk deludedly bestow upon them. But since they’re shown performing virtually every meaningful task, it’s entirely logical that they should conclude that the men are disposable: if David Attenborough was to present this behaviour as being characteristic of any other species, we’d blithely accept it as part of the natural order of things.