09/01/2007

While awaiting the revision of the 1982 agreement, expected to take place in 2007, some new Hungarian/Italian co-productions will take centre stage at the upcoming Hungarian Film Week, taking place from January 30-February 6 in Budapest (see news).

Apart from Zoltán Kamondi’s Dolina (formerly The Archbishop's Visit, see article) – a co-production between Hungary’s Honeymood Films and Focus Films, and Italian outfit Gam Film – another feature among the 18 in competition, Everything is Different by directing duo István Dárday and Györgyi Szalai, is a co-production between the two countries.

Produced by Hungary’s Jenô Hábermann for FilmART, in co-production with Fókuszfilm and backed by the Concorde Film Trust, Everything is Different also received co-production funding from Milan-based outfit Atre Film Factory.

With a production budget of less than €900,000, the feature recounts the last years of Hungarian writer Sándor Márai, spent in exile with his wife in San Diego, where he committed suicide in 1989. The novelist-poet became famous during the thirties and lived in Italy before moving to the US in 1948.

However, when the Soviet repression began in Budapest in 1956, his books were no longer published in Hungary, or elsewhere. In recent years, his films – The Confessions of a Bourgeois, Embers, Esther’s Inheritance, among others – have been rediscovered and translated, making Márai one of the greatest authors in Hungarian literature, as well as one of the masters of the European novel.

The film is being produced by Dárday and Szalai, heirs of the Budapest School of the 1970s (like Bela Tarr) and is a cross between fiction and documentary. FIPRESCI award-winners at the 1989 Berlin Film Festival with Reflections, the duo have only produced five features in their 32-year career.

Márai is played by Ferenc Bács, a star of Hungarian theatre, while Katalin Gyöngyössy plays Lola, the writer’s wife.

(Translated from French)