19/11/2007

Hungarian cinema will be represented out of competition at the 25th Turin Film Festival (November 23-December 1) by Tamás Tóth’s Wolf (Farkas), a film described by Nanni Moretti, the newly appointed artistic director of the event, as "a strange, unusual and disturbing reinterpretation of the vampire myth".

The fifth feature by the Budapest-born Tóth (41) – whose previous film Rinaldó, supported by the Sundance Institute, picked up the Best Supporting Actor Award at Hungarian Film Week 2003 – Wolf was co-written by the director and Russian actor Aleksandr Bashirov (for whom this is his second screenplay after The Iron Heel of Oligarchy, which won acclaim at Rotterdam in 1999).

The story is set in a small Siberian village totally dependent upon reindeer breeding. Unexpectedly, wolves start to destroy the herds, sucking the animals’ blood without killing or eating them. The villagers are therefore forced to go to a faraway town to seek the help of a man thought to be the descendant of a Shaman and who knows how to communicate with animals.

Initially, the hard-drinking man spends more time trying to seduce the village girls than he does trying to solve the problem in question, but sooner or later he has to confront a situation that is a sign of new times and has a profound effect upon everyone’s future.

Starring Bashirov and Vladimir Merov, Wolf was produced by Hungarian companies MyFilm and Tomart Studio, with Russia’s Jugra TV co-producing, and supported by the Motion Picture Public Foundation of Hungary (MMKA).

The film, also produced and edited by its director, was unveiled in February at Hungarian Film Week and released domestically on September 26 by Hungarotop.

(Translated from French)