Hungary Shines at Venice Film Festival: A Big Year for Hungarian Cinema
zita kisgergely
Hungary arrived at the Venice Film Festival with not one but two films in competition for the Golden Lion, claiming some well-deserved international limelight on the Lido.
Picture via Imdb
It’s been over half a century since two Hungarian films ran side by side in Venice’s main competition. This year, László Nemes’s ORPHAN (Árva) and Ildikó Enyedi’s SILENT FRIEND did just that.
Nemes, already acclaimed for his Oscar-winning film SON OF SAUL, returned with ORPHAN, a Hungarian-British-French-German co-production. Shot on 35mm film in Hungary, it tells the story of a boy navigating the post-1956-revolution era in Budapest while searching for his father.
Enyedi is an Oscar-nominated director who won the Golden Bear at the 2017 Berlin International Film Festival for ON BODY & SOUL. Her newest film, SILENT FRIEND, is a poetic tale playing across three timelines about the relationship between humans and plants. The feature, starring an international cast (Léa Seydoux, Tony Leung, and Luna Wedler), captivated critics and audiences alike in Venice. The film won not only the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Wedler but also secured five major collateral prizes, including the FIPRESCI Prize for Best Film in Competition and the Green Drop Award.
Shooting on 35mm in Hungary: A Growing Trend
Both Hungarian competition films share another connection: they were shot on film and developed at the NFI Filmlab in Budapest. The NFI Filmlab, part of the National Film Institute Hungary, is one of the very few facilities worldwide still offering analogue film processing services — from 16mm, 35mm, and 65mm film development to positive printing and efilm cutting.
With over 60 years of expertise, this Budapest-based facility has become the most experienced film laboratory in Central Europe. With analogue making a come-back, international productions such as THE BRUTALIST continue to rely on the Filmlab’s unique services.
Ildikó Enyedi and the Philosophy Behind Silent Friend
In an interview with Marta Balaga for Variety, Enyedi explained her fascination with plant communication — an idea rooted in the “flower power” era of the 1970s and further explored in SILENT FRIEND. The film spans 1908, 1972, and 2020 at a German university, weaving together stories of a pioneering student, a love-struck caretaker, and a neuroscientist (Tony Leung) obsessed with a mysterious ginkgo tree.
For Enyedi, the film is not an overt ecological statement but rather an invitation to rethink how we perceive the world around us. “Many changes in our life could happen effortlessly if we just shifted our point of view a little,” she says.
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