Gyula Hernádi

In the Kerepesi Street cemetery, three grave diggers contemplate the fate of the world, then they step out of this role and in a sequence of episodes they play the typical figures of contemporary Hungarian reality, the fat cat, the swashbuckler, the victim, underworld chieftains, and present little absurd dramas of love, marriage, friendship, public order and legal safety. The author and the film director walk among them all the time, contemplating, laughing at their plays. The stories starting from the graveyard and returning there warn of the inevitability of death. The author and the director (Gyula Hernádi and Miklós Jancsó) wisely make friends with death.

This time, Kapa and Pepe are first of all prisoners of war – and convicts taken to forced labor service, Jews, Hungarian soldiers, German soldiers. Once they are to be executed, then again they are to perform executions. The film tells in spectacular episodes about the fact that in the past more than one century and a half we kept marching from war to war; occupation and liberation turned out to be indifferent, and why couldn’t the Jews execute the SS-guys? Our heroes hover about dilapidated barracks, then again on the bridges of the capital they guess whose satellites or eternal friends for all times we might be just now. In the cupboard, among the preserved fruit bottles, Stalin is still hiding. The authors of the film are cited before court, then in a showcase hospital they are waiting for the end to come. A Soviet soldier-maid closes the film with a Péter Nádas-quote.

A young doctor undergoes a spiritual crisis when he returns to his rural home.