A six-time winner of the Best Documentary Award at the Hungarian Film Week, five-time winner of the Film Critics’ Prize, and recipient of numerous awards from the Béla Balázs to the Kossuth Prize. The awards are a recognition for the outstanding filmmaker who, after his first feature film, the highly successful Ballagás in 1981, turned to documentaries and made a number of ground-breaking films. He has explored historical, social and personal themes with exceptional sensitivity. In documentaries, “I don’t invent the story, I find it,” he says. His films reveal the many faces and contradictions of Hungary before and after the 1989 fall of communism. Almási’s subject is reality, his partner is truth, his medium is film, his aim is not to judge but to show. Between 1987 and 1998, after his 1983 film Kölyköd voltam, he produced one of the greatest undertakings in Hungarian documentary filmmaking, the eight-part Ózd series (the first part of which Pinch – Szorításban is screened in the CineClassics program), which follows the personal fates of workers and managers and documents the period of regime change through the agony of the Ózd factory. But he also portrayed the fate of Hungarians who migrated from across the border (Valahol otthon lenni), as well as that of female clothing factory workers (Kitüntetetten) and innocent convicts (Ítéletlenül). The private sphere is represented in masterpieces such as Szerelem első hallásra, Szívügyem and Sejtjeink. Folyékony arany, which premiered at CineFest 2019, is the first Hungarian film about wine, while the highly successful Puskás Hungary brings the legendary footballer close to the people. The Ambassador of the European Cine awardwinner of CineFest 2019 was Franco Nero, who played the leading role in Almási’s Márió, a varázsló in 2007. Professor emeritus at the University of Theatre and Film Arts, he has taught generations of students. “I believe,” he says, “that if I make films, I become a better person.” Tamás Almási, 75 years old this year, has made more than 40 films. In 2023, he will be awarded the Miskolc International Film Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award.