Next Friday the 18th CineFest Miskolc International Film Festival will open its gates. At the opening ceremony, Piroska Molnár will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award, and at the closing gala, another Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented to legendary Hungarian animation filmmaker Ferenc Rófusz for his decades of outstanding work across continents. In his honor, the Oscar-winning film The Fly will be screened.

The Fly was the first Hungarian film to win an Oscar – but the statue itself couldn’t be handed over to the director, Ferenc Rofusz, at the ceremony, because he couldn’t travel to Hollywood. At that time and from that on, the film and its creator received many awards at home and abroad, from the Kossuth Prize to the Order of St. Stephen. He started his career as a set and animation artist at Mafilm and worked at Pannónia Film Studio from 1968. In 1972, he directed his first film, Kő (Stone), based on an idea by József Nepp. As co-director and designer, he participated in the creation of the legendary Gusztáv series. 1982’s Deadlock and 1983’s Gravitation won numerous awards from Oberhausen to Hiroshima, from Toronto to the Hungarian Short Film Festival of the time in Miskolc.

From 1984 he lived in Germany, and from 1988 to 2001 in Canada, where he set up his own studio. During this period, he made more than 60 commercials and numerous series, using both traditional and digital techniques. His film The Last Supper was completed in 2018, after 40 years: in 1978, it was not allowed to be finished for political reasons. In the context of Leonardo’s irreversibly decaying fresco the film also speaks about Europe today. Yet, the director’s message is that “new life must be born beyond the image, beyond the wall, beyond the screen, in the viewer: Leonardo da Vinci’s work, the image of human transience, may be lost, may disappear, but the message of redemption and love is common and eternal for all humanity.”

At the 1981 Miskolc Film Festival, he decided to withdraw The Fly from the competition program – so that his colleagues would not have to compete with an Oscar-winning film. The festival then awarded him a Fair Play Prize – and now Ferenc Rofusz is the recipient of the Miskolc International Film Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award.