Just The Wind by Bence Fliegauf wins Jury Grand Prix

by Fabien Lemercier

20/02/2012 - For the second year in a row, Hungarian cinema has taken away the Jury Grand Prix at the Berlinale. After The Turin Horse [trailer, film focus] by Béla Tarr last year, Just The Wind [trailer, film focus] (Csak a szél) by Bence Fliegauf (read more) was this year awarded by the jury at the Berlinale, this time headed by British director Mike Leigh.

The 37-year-old filmmaker directed, but also also wrote the script, took on production design, and helped compose the music for his fifth feature Just The Wind. Inspired by a case in the news, the film is a rural thriller set to a background of racism featuring a Gypsy family of the great plains being hunted down by killers. Agilely avoiding any clichés about the situation of the Roma in Eastern Europe (a topic recently addressed by numerous films), Fliegauf has chosen non-professional actors and immerged himself in a community that he knew very well in his childhood and adolescence. The director, who create an oppressive climate in his film, in particular through the close-ups of cameraman and director of photography Zoltán Lovasi, stressed in Berlin that he had embarked on the project after intense recurring dreams, and not from any desire to denounce or to conduct a sociological study.

Fliegauf was selected twice at the Berlinale’s Forum in 2003 with his first feature Forest and in 2004 with Dealer, then in 2007 won the Golden Leopard for his experimental film Milky Way in the Filmmakers of the Present section of the Locarno Film Festival, where his next film in English Womb [trailer] took part in the competition in 2010. The Berlin Jury Grand Prix is clearly a new landmark in his career.

Produced by Mónika Mécs, András Muhi, and Ernö Mesterházy for the Hungarian production company Inforg-M&M Film (the filmmaker’s partner for years), Just The Wind was co-produced by Germany (Rebekka Garrido and Michael Reuter for The Post Republic) and France (Pierre- Emmanuel Fleurantin and Laurent Baujard for Paprika Films). Notably supported by Eurimages, the film is sold by The Match Factory.

(Translated from French)