Hungarian film week opens with revival of 1914 film

A Hungarian film week opened in Budapest on Monday with the screening of a century old film called "The Exile" (A tolonc).

The silent film is a fledgling work by Michael Curtiz, the Hungarian director who later became a Hollywood legend with such films as the Academy Award winning Casablanca, considered by many to be the greatest romantic film of all time.

A musical score was composed especially for this first presentation in a century and was performed by a live orchestra.

It stars a legend of the Hungarian theater, Mari Jaszai, who was born in 1850 and never lived to see sound film. The Exile is one of the only two films she ever performed in.

The only copy of The Exile known to exist was saved by accident and found in the cellar of the Hungarian Institute in New York 10 years ago, Hungarian National Film Foundation CEO Agnes Havas told the audience. It was restored and digitalized for this showing.

The Film Week festival will run through Sunday, and the products of three years of Hungarian cinema, 332 films in all, will be screened.

Hungarian-American movie producer Andrew Vajna, commissioned by the Hungarian government to rejuvenate the Hungarian film industry, described the nearly one year-long effort to bring this film week to fruition at the opening ceremony.

Several of the films on show will be screened for the very first time including a romantic comedy directed by Ferenc Torok tentatively called No Man's Island.

Another interesting production is a Hungarian-Serbian film directed by Szabolcs Tolnai called Strange Forest.

For Some Inexplicable Reason, a film directed by Gabor Reisz that won the jury's grand prix at this year's Cinefest in Sudbury, Ontario, will also be on show.

The feature films offered to audiences include White God, directed by Kornel Mundruczo, and The Notebook, directed by Janos Szasz, both of which have taken the international festival world by storm.

The Notebook, Grand Prix winner at the Karlovy Vary film festival, was Hungary's official submission for the 2014 Academy Awards, while White God won Un Certain Regard prize at the Cannes Film Festival and is entered for the 2015 Academy Awards.