Sándor Csóori

Lors des Jeux olympiques d'été de 1956 de Melbourne, les équipes masculines de water-polo de Hongrie et de l'Union soviétique doivent s'affronter en demi-finales, le match ayant lieu peu après l'Insurrection de Budapest écrasée par l'Armée rouge. L'équipe hongroise n'a été informée des détails de la répression brutale effectuée par les Soviétiques qu'à son arrivée en Australie, et l'animosité entre les deux équipes est à son comble. Le match entrera dans l'histoire des Jeux Olympiques sous le nom de Bain de sang de Melbourne. Le documentaire est axé sur le joueur hongrois Ervin Zádor et est narré par Mark Spitz.

The film tells the story of a regiment of Hungarian hussars stationed in Poland. The hussars, mostly ordinary men, have heard news of the uprising and wish to return to the homeland to defend the newly independent country. The Empire, on the other hand, is firmly resolved that all Hungarian troops in the imperial army should be kept as far away from the trouble spot as possible, knowing that most soldiers would be loyal to Budapest rather than Vienna.

The film is a historic parable about the topicality of revolution. 1514. The peasants' uprising is over, Dózsa has been arrested. Werbőczy tries to get the imprisoned peasant leader deny the revolution and offers him the lives of his people in exchange.

The story of the film takes place in 1929 in a model prison providing a kind of reflection how society works out there. Udvardi, the weakling and indulgent director is experimenting with putting in practice a kind of pseudo-humanist utopia about the institution of a 'civilised prison'.

In the summer of 1944 soldier Csorba is rewarded with furlough at a price of having committed a murder. He escapes. He tries to get to the heights of the Carpathians with Mother, to the cave of those who wish to die. That is where his mother and his father, the deserter, might be hiding.

From the intrigues and slander of the branch the painter Hódosi moves out to a hamlet at Hortobágy. He gets into conflict situation as well as he cannot endure that the political and economic elite of the neigbourhood would devastate the nature conservation area with hunting and (tax evading) goose husbandry.

An aspiring film student is denied a scholarship to the state-funded university when his father is thrown in jail. The man had stopped a train in order to facilitate the union between two old friends. The son then takes a job as a land surveyor and meets a Greek man who works towards the collective benefits of the peasants. The man is killed in a peasant uprising prompted by a bureaucratic boondoggle. The surveyor looks after the man's widow as his emerging political and social awareness leads him take a stand against government injustice. Another incident, in which gypsies are rounded up by state hygiene workers, further galvanizes the man's beliefs. He photographs the incident, and his work allows him to be accepted into the school from which he was previously denied admission.

The changing and turbulent history of Hungary is seen through the eyes of three men over a 30-year period in this somber drama. The three recall the highlights of their lives in flashbacks as they reminisce in the mid 1960s. The venerable trio begin their story in the 1930s, through World War II, and the decade beyond the communist invasion of 1956.