Budapest Tales

A Hungarian Secret Service official attempts to defect the country and earn political asylum in the West.

An adaptation of a well-known novel by Hungarian writer Lajos Zilahy.

Shortly after the end of World War II, a con man on the run finds himself in a passionate love affair that may well cost him his life.

The movie deals with the championship-winning German soccer team of 1954. Its story is linked with two others: The family of a young boy is split due to the events in World War II, and the father returns from Russia after eleven years. The second story is about a reporter and his wife reporting from the tournament.

Two employees at a gift shop can barely stand one another, without realising that they are falling in love through the post as each other's anonymous pen pal.

Entering a seamy underground world of peep shows, nude clubs, and live Internet sex is David Huxley, an aspiring politician who has everything to lose. Secretly filmed in a steamy three-way with his fiancée Tish and a gorgeous young model, David is desperate to find the extortionist who's demanding an exorbitant amount of money for the negatives. But when the blackmail trail ends in murder and David is kidnapped, Tish must come up with $5 million ransom or her fiancé's once-promising career, and life, may come to a dead end.

A tale about a strange young man, Bulcsú, and the fellow ticket inspectors on his team who work aboard the subterranean Budapest Metro. A tale about racing along the tracks, and about a mysterious serial killer. And a tale about love.

Budapest in the thirties. The restaurant owner Laszlo hires the pianist András to play in his restaurant. Both men fall in love with the beautiful waitress Ilona who inspires András to his only composition. His song of Gloomy Sunday is, at first, loved and then feared, for its melancholic melody triggers off a chain of suicides. The fragile balance of the erotic ménage à trois is sent off kilter when the German Hans goes and falls in love with Ilona as well.

A modern-day reimagining of Alice-in-Wonderland with the beloved creatures turned into human characters and follows Alicia on a wildly magical trip into the Wonderland that is Budapest. Having recently lost her beloved mother, Alicia backpacks through Europe to fulfill her mother's last wish. A chance encounter with a strange girl forces Alicia on a mind-bending overnight adventure, where she meets not only a mysterious young man, but a whole menagerie of individuals that take her on an odyssey that will open her heart and mind.

Leia can't seem to find anything in her surroundings that would help her get some inspiration for her drawing. She feels stuck and burnt out until she has a dream that finally gives her the motivation she needed. She then realizes that you can't force art, it comes unexpectedly and naturally.

An Hungarian youth comes of age at Buchenwald during World War II. György Köves is 14, the son of a merchant who's sent to a forced labor camp. After his father's departure, György gets a job at a brickyard; his bus is stopped and its Jewish occupants sent to camps. There, György find camaraderie, suffering, cruelty, illness, and death. He hears advice on preserving one's dignity and self-esteem. He discovers hatred. If he does survive and returns to Budapest, what will he find? What is natural; what is it to be a Jew? Sepia, black and white, and color alternate to shade the mood.

A Hungarian family forced to flee the Communist country for the United States must leave a young daughter behind. Six years later, the family arranges to bring the absent daughter to the United States where she has trouble adjusting. The daughter then decides to travel to Budapest to discover her identity.

Janos and Kata are thrown together during the Second World War and forced to pose as husband and wife to hide from the Nazis. The intensity and suffocating intimacy of their new relationship and the circumstances in which they find themselves, forces them to confront past prejudices and assumptions and challenge what they truly believe.

In the bleak days of the Cold War, espionage veteran George Smiley is forced from semi-retirement to uncover a Soviet mole within his former colleagues at the heart of MI6.

A Communist officer falls hard for a married woman trying to escape from Hungary.

Budapest, Hungary, Christmas 1957. The state, insecure after the defeated revolution of 1956 and increasingly put under the influence of a renewed Stalinist atmosphere, has decreed that all security officials must pass an exam to verify their loyalty. But to be actually effective in a shadowy world where suspicion and secrets reign, the subjects must be unaware that they are being tested.

Vincent, a reckless French boy, travels to Hungary to liquidate the home of a relative he has never seen. In an apartment cluttered with dusty objects and furniture, he is confronted not only with the past of others, but also with his own present.

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.

Karesz has been raised in an institution, his mother has a new family, and her husband does not tolerate that she meets her first-born son. Karesz tramps, joining up with his casual pals he washes the windscreens of cars, sells newspapers; sometimes they steal, or break into houses if hired.

Iván is living in exile from Hungary when he receives word that an old flame is ill. His return to Budapest rekindles old memories and reopens old wounds.