SYNOPSIS

Following the fall of the Berlin wall, a downright onslaught on archives took place in Eastern Europe. Nothing is as important one’s own past: the complex history of a socialist state that wanted to combine ideology with intellectualism, art with politics.

The film portrays Hungary’s former Stalin City guided by a cantata, from the musical perspective of the composer Peter Horváth, whose parents were thoroughly communist, but nevertheless doubting amateur party members. The father a flutist of the symphony orchestra (performing in the fatal year of 1956 in front of Mao’s comrades), the mother a woman of letters with a tendency to pedagogy, the son curious but discreet. The film repeatedly presents archive film and audio material in between the protagonists’ narratives. This gives Stalin City and Hungary a kind of idyllic everyday image that contrasts the increasingly close-knit story that unfolds.  The different versions of the big rebellion – the whole story was never seen like this before.

Developed in the framework of the Discovery Campus Masterschool

Festivals

DOK Leipzig, 59th International Festival for Documentary and Animated Film

East Silver

East Silver Caravan

Ashdod International Music and Film Festival