Lifetime Award 2024

KARDOS Sándor

“God’s fi nger touched the picture”, says Sándor Kardos. This is true of the classics he has photographed, from Little Valentino to Eldorado, and it is also true of the photographs of the Horus Archive, the private photography collection he founded, because „the sum of the images represents the one, the whole”. From a fraction of the millions of collected amateur photographs an exhibition was opened in Budapest in 2020 and in Szeged in 2021 the essence of which is the plurality of additional meanings and associations that arise involuntarily. In Glance of Horus, he writes about „conjectures in the theory of images”. For the fi rst time ever, he made a feature fi lm, The Gravedigger, using a photo-fi nish camera. He also used the technique in his short Slit Film (Résfi lm). He captured time in space: the photo-fi nish camera captures every moment through a continuously open lens, the slit, without interruption in time.

He has won the Kossuth and Béla Balázs awards, three times the Hungarian Film Critics’ Prize, twice the Hungarian Film Week Award and was nominated for the European Film Prize for Eldorado in 1989. He has photographed more than thirty feature fi lms. As a cinematographer of András Jeles, Géza Bereményi, Béla Tarr, Péter Tímár and Frigyes Gödrös, he photographed such fi lms as Sound Eroticism, The Bridgeman, The Harum-Scarum Family, The Pregnant Papa, Miracle in Krakow, Almanac of Fall and Dream Brigade.

In 2024, the CineFest Lifetime Achievement Award will go to the 80-year-old Sándor Kardos, one of the greatest experimenters in Hungarian cinema.