The greatest films of the year in the CinFest competition program, tickets are soon on sale!
The director of Oldboy and The Handmaiden, Park Chan-wook won the Best Director award at Cannes this year for Decision To Leave, a film that fuses the atmosphere of classic noir with South-Korean cinema and, of course, Park’s own style. The story’s protagonist, detective Hae-jun, works on the case of a mountain climber who has fallen off a cliff, and in the course of solving the case he meets the mysterious and attractive widow Seo-rae. During the interrogations, they grow closer and closer.
The story of Sisi is a favorite with Hungarian audiences, but the Corsage, coming to CineFest from Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section, destroys all the myths that the mini-series with Romy Schneider created at the time. Vicky Krieps, the newcomer of the phenomenal Phantom Thread, takes on the role of Elisabeth Wittelsbach, who is in emotional crisis on her fortieth birthday. How does the woman known for her youthful beauty feel? How was the private life of a monarch whose place in society was marked more by her husband’s position than by her own virtues?
This year’s Cannes Jury Prize winner Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO stars a donkey who experiences the depressive and brutal East, but also the decadent West. EO is at once an imaginative journey, a stunning visual and atmospheric film, a profound drama, a stark social critique and a mirror of the world we have created.
Director Lukas Dhont won a shared Grand Prix at Cannes with his film Close, and was considered by most critics to be one of the best films in this year’s competition program – Hungarian audiences will soon decide whether the same is true for CineFest. The film is a drama about the friendship of two Latin American teenagers, broken by bullying. As with Dhont’s previous film, Girl, this film tackles socially relevant issues with exceptional sensitivity.
Debuting in the competition program of the Venice International Film Festival, The Accusation is a rape story that asks uncomfortable questions in the era of the #MeToo movement, illustrating from two different points of view that nothing is black or white. The film is a veritable French star parade, directed by actor Yvan Attal and starring Charlotte Gainsbourg and Mathieu Kassovitz.
At the same event, Il Buco won the Special Jury Prize. Although the film recalls an earlier caving expedition, the director is interested in another dimension of the underground escape. The hole that leads to the hidden labyrinths is a kind of Hades’ gate, the entrance to the realm of the dead, around which an old, sickly shepherd circles day after day. The walls of the caverns are slowly being overlaid by time, and the billions of years of the planet’s existence are an eternity compared to the fragile animal, plant and human living on its surface, stumbling and fading fast. The film is a moving story about the beauty of nature and the fate written on the face of the shepherd.
Telling the story of a teenage girl’s time in rehab for heroin addiction in clean, sophisticated frames in 4:3, Immaculate is a proof again that Romanian cinema is bursting with boundless new energies and unexpected emotions. Screened in the selection of the recent Venice Festival Giornate degli Autori (Venice Days), the film won the Lion of the Future Award for Best Debut.
Perhaps the strongest film in this year’s Berlinale competition was Return To Dust, which depicts the harsh realism of the Chinese countryside with stark honesty through the arranged marriage of two outsiders, but masterfully combines this with a fairytale-like faith in the power of emotions.
CineFest has always made it a priority to bring the best of American independent film to Hungarian audiences, and this year is no different. A Love Song, which was screened at the and the Berlinale, is a lyrical drama evoking the fleeting beauty of everyday life. With unparalleled tenderness and subtle humor, it portrays Faye (Dale Dickey), a lonely traveler who waits in a deserted Colorado campsite for a man, Litora (Wes Studi), from her distant past. Both have recently lost someone they loved, and now they hope to find solace and a companion in each other. Writer-director Robert Machoian’s new film, The Integrity of Joseph Chambers, from Tribeca, is a stripped-down, atmospheric drama of its own. Machoian deftly delivers the chills in carefully measured doses. The narrative, sparse on dialogue and long on dread, impressively reveals the emotions of the title character as he sets out on a hunt. The viewer quickly becomes a committed observer of a grim moral fable.
Kristina Buožytė was awarded the Emeric Pressburger Prize at CineFest ten years ago for her film Vanishing Waves, so it is great news that she is returning to the competition with her latest sci-fi film, which has a significantly bigger budget than her previous one. The title character in Vesper is a 13-year-old girl. Vesper goes to great lengths to find food for herself and her paralyzed father, while experimenting with biological samples in her laboratory. One day in the woods, she finds a woman. She hopes that this mysterious woman will take her to the Citadel, a place where the elite lives and decides the fate of the rest of the world.
The 18th CineFest Miskolc International Film Festival will take place in Miskolc from 9 to 17 September 2022.
