The Circuit

by Nick Holdsworth
Politics and film festivals are never far apart but in Budapest the annual Hungarian national film week each February is renowned for making it personal.

This year's 39th edition was wrong footed from the beginning.

Bela Tarr, a Cannes celebrated director noted for his austere black and white filmic essays about austere, black and white characters struggling with elemental internal and external demons, was on the war path.

Tarr, one of the bigger beasts among the constellation of serious art-house names that still dominate Hungary's tiny but critically acclaimed auteur cinema, had been promised the opening night for his adaptation of George Simenon's thriller "The Man from London" (pictured above).

It is a dark and somber movie that stars Tilda Swinton and opens with a long lingering shot of a tramp steamer's prow and continues with long lingering shots of the back of a night watchman's head, a bowl of soup, a light bulb and shade and other deep, meaningful images that took it into competition at Cannes last year.

Everything seemed fine until the film week's seven, strong managing board asked to see the movie last October.

Tarr arranged for a copy to be flown in specially from the US.

On the appointed day only one board member showed up. When Tarr called the board to find out what was going on he was curtly informed that the festival had "changed its concept" and the film would not be shown.

Tarr who had already suffered costly production delays when French producer Humbert Balsan committed suicide in February 2005 mid-way through filming, was furious.

To make a point, he had the film screened the day before the festival opened. The only problem was that none of the dozens of senior international film critics and festival chiefs due in town had yet arrived.

Undeterred Tarr arranged another screening a few days later in Pest's splendid 1899 freshly restored Moorish-influenced Urania film theatre.

A tall wiry man who wears his dark, graying hair in a pony tail, Tarr sent out personal invitations addressed to 'dear friends' among the foreign guests.

With Eva Vezer -- general manager of Magyar Filmunio, Hungary's interntional film promotion body -- silently watching from the back of the screening hall Tarr thundered: "The shame is theirs, not ours. Please welcome this movie. We are very proud of it."

The spat is all too typical of a country where filmmakers are perhaps more self-obsessed than anywhere else.

Movie after movie in this year's competition schedule -- which presents virtually all Hungarian features made in the previous 12 months -- dealt with subjects of little interest to most audiences.

Even this year's international sales hope Erik Novak's "Nosedive" starring Hungarian European Shooting Star Zsolt Nagy, a violent confection of drugs, Russian mafia and sex, had viewers at the press screening streaming for the exit.

Despite the promised delights of bedroom scenes with the film's gorgeous Dorka Gryllus (who played an Eastern European sex worker in Sam Garbarski's"Irina Palm"), I headed out when one thug slammed an ice pick into the eye socket of another.

Hungarian audiences reacted similarly -- "Nosedive" had just 31,000 admissions following its domestic theatrical release, making just 26 million Hungarian forints ($142,000) at the box office according the 39th film week's festival catalogue.