Judit Elek

Merry hell breaks lose when half of Budapest invades the apartment of a lonely, old fashioned elderly lady who has decided to move.

Judit Elek focused on the last months of Martinovics’ life: his interrogation by the Austrians, the examining Magistrate Schilling in particular, shown as a battle of wits as well as delusions – on both sides.

Katherine, who survived the Holocaust at age seven, visits her fatherland of Transylvania, Romania for the first time departing from Sweden with her family. Not only do both happy and frightful memories of her forgotten past come to life, but she must also face the depressing reality of Ceausescu’s communist dictatorship and the romance developing between her husband and her sister.

The Hungarian Maria’s Day is set in that most fateful of years, 1848. The incredible changes and reverses in European politics and culture exert a potent influence on one aristocratic Hungarian family. Losing virtually everything in the way of creature comforts, the family tries to keep up appearances. Eventually every member of the clan falls victim to illness, syphilis and their own headstrong foolishness.

A couple in love, but sadly married to other partners. What is to be done?

In the 19th century Austro-Hungarian Empire, David Hersko, a Jewish shepherd, witnesses the attack of a young girl. His home is burned down and he finds shelter with the family of a Jewish logger. The loggers find the body of a young woman which they bury, going against local laws. They are charged with her murder and it is believed that they killed her as a ritual murder.

In a society that measures a human being’s value by productivity, few questions could be more subversive than those concerning the value of people who aren’t working. Elek explores this through a labourer forced into retirement and his young replacement, a peasant in an industrial school.

A man, a woman, an afternoon, a city, and an unspoken, hopeful desire to find love by way of the personal ads.

Judit Elek continued to follow the happenings in the small village. What started as a specific investigation into the predicaments and dreams of the younger generation turns into a pars pro toto panorama of People's Hungary in various shades of grey – the economic reforms of 1968 and the cultural liberties supposedly connected to them certainly hadn’t reached vast parts of the nation.

Budapest in the 1950s. Kati is barely a teenager yet forced to fend for herself – her mother is dead, her father working far away in an iron foundry. And yet, she’s not alone: her mother’s ghost visits once in a while, when invoked by need or yearning, while more earthly characters like a young bookseller start to fill spaces in her life.

The film sums up the results of a massive endeavour in historical restoration and reconstruction, then recording Elek became engaged with: that of the Chasidic songs Hungarian/Romanian composer Max/Miksa/Mihai Eisikovits wrote down in 1938-39 – purely phonetically, without knowing either Yiddish or Hebrew or Aramaic. Elek also published a massive tome with translations of the songs, including into English.