Best Hungarian drama movies

Rachel Singer is a former Mossad agent who tried to capture a notorious Nazi war criminal – the Surgeon of Birkenau – in a secret Israeli mission that ended with his death on the streets of East Berlin. Now, 30 years later, a man claiming to be the doctor has surfaced, and Rachel must return to Eastern Europe to uncover the truth. Overwhelmed by haunting memories of her younger self and her two fellow agents, the still-celebrated heroine must relive the trauma of those events and confront the debt she has incurred.

In the horror of 1944 Auschwitz, a prisoner forced to burn the corpses of his own people finds moral survival trying to save from the flames the body of a boy he takes for his son, seeking to give him a proper jewish burial.

Two introverted people find out by pure chance that they share the same dream every night. They are puzzled, incredulous, a bit frightened. As they hesitantly accept this strange coincidence, they try to recreate in broad daylight what happens in their dream.

13 year old Lili fights to protect her dog Hagen, and is devastated when her father sets Hagen free on the streets. Still innocently believing love can conquer any difficulty, Lili sets out to save her dog. Failing in his desperate efforts to find his beloved owner, Hagen joins a canine revolt leading a revolution against their human abusers.

A tale about a strange young man, Bulcsú, and the fellow ticket inspectors on his team who work aboard the subterranean Budapest Metro. A tale about racing along the tracks, and about a mysterious serial killer. And a tale about love.

A monumental windstorm and an abused horse's refusal to work or eat signal the beginning of the end for a poor farmer and his daughter.

A naive young man witnesses an escalation of violence in his small hometown following the arrival of a mysterious circus attraction.

Inhabitants of a small village in Hungary deal with the effects of the fall of Communism. The town's source of revenue, a factory, has closed, and the locals, who include a doctor and three couples, await a cash payment offered in the wake of the shuttering. Irimias, a villager thought to be dead, returns and, unbeknownst to the locals, is a police informant. In a scheme, he persuades the villagers to form a commune with him.

A psychotic killer is on the prowl, who continues to slaughter young women while an innocent man is wrongly accused and sentenced for crimes he could never have committed. A determined detective arrives on the scene and soon becomes obsessed with the case while under pressure from the prosecutor to see a man hang.

Quiet 10-year-old Zsofi has just changed schools. Feeling out of place at first, she is quickly admitted to the school’s famous choir and befriends her popular classmate Liza. Soon, they have to stand up united against their choir master, who isn’t quite the friendly and inspirational teacher they first thought she was.

A hardened mercenary in the Foreign Legion begins to find his own humanity when confronted with atrocities during the fighting in Bosnia.

The new owner of a brilliant race horse finds love while carrying out his revenge on the man who murdered his father.

Szabolcs plays in a German football team, as does Bernard. They are roommates, best friends, inseparable. A lost match makes him reconsider his life and he goes back to Hungary in hope for more simplicity. Yet his solitude does not last long. Soon after his arrival he meets Áron and a mutual attraction between the two boys develops when suddenly Szabolcs receives an unexpected phone call from Bernard: he has arrived to Hungary...

Two physically handicapped youngsters make friends with a paralysed hitman and are commissioned by a local mafia boss. They have little to lose although things are never as they first appear. The boundaries between fantasy and reality blur as the unlikely heroes stumble from one close encounter to the next and we gain an unusual insight into their lives on the periphery of society.

An unsettling feeling overwhelms a small Hungarian town when two orthodox Jews arrive with a mysterious trunk. As residents begin to speculate on the purpose of the visit of these two strangers, order starts to crumble in town with some pursuing devious plans and others finding remorse in their hearts.

After waking up in the middle of a forest with no memories, a young woman is targeted by mysterious strangers with a motive as unclear as her way back home.

In 1944 Budapest, one of a group of four friends poses a hypothetical moral question to the others, an act that will unexpectedly alter their lives forever.

Based upon the final confession of Adolf Eichmann, made before his execution in Israel, of his role in Hitler's plan for the final solution.

A film where anything can happen - the hero and the heroine changes their faces, age, look, names, and so on. The only same thing: The love between man and woman... in an archetypical love story cut from 500 classics from all around the world.

Set in 19th century Vienna, Ignac Semmelweis, a short-tempered but passionate doctor, delivers babies and carries out autopsies on a daily basis while looking for the cause of puerperal fever, the mysterious epidemic that decimates patients in the hospital.

Djata is a care-free 12-year-old growing up in a brutal dictatorship shut off from the outside world. When the government imprisons his father, Peter, and Djata and his mother Hannah are labeled traitors, the boy will not rest until he sees his father again.

Karrer plods his way through life in quiet desperation. His environment is drab and rainy and muddy. Eaten up with solitude, his hopelessness would be incurable but for the existence of the Titanik Bar and its beautiful, haunting singer. But the lady is married and Karrer is determined to keep her husband away...

The story takes place on New Year's Eve that a group of friends have been celebrating together for years. The host is the newly divorced psychologist, Aliz, and her guests are her younger brother, Döme, the chemistry teacher, Kristóf, the gynecologist, Gábor, the cook, and Márk, the photographer. They are all childhood best friends. In the meantime, Gábor's wife, Saci, the lawyer, and Márk's girlfriend, Fanni, the young special education teacher joins the group. The topic of the conversation veers in the direction of how nowadays people store many secrets and confidential information on their cell phones, and what kinds of conflicts may arise if the phones fall into unauthorized hands. Each of the seven members of the group insists on not having any secrets, on their lives being an open book, to which Aliz suggests that they should prove it.

At a gas station in the middle of nowhere, a young man arrives to meet his father he hasn't seen for 30 years. On the same day, a van with four prostitutes breaks down at the very same gas station, on the way to Switzerland. The three days they spend together in the station change their lives forever.

Áron stands in his life as an average 29-year-old weirdo. He has many contemporary complexes, a fresh university degree, and a recent break up. His parents have to support him financially as he is still a job seeker and while Áron is agonizing on his lost love, he is always interrupted by something; it seems like he’s not the main character in his life.

Eszter, 16, is secretly in love with her English teacher, while Peter, also 16, is hopelessly in love with Eszter. One day, the teacher announces that he is leaving the school to move to London. That same day, Eszter receives a farewell e-mail message from him. An online affair begins and spirals into sexual abuse.

Márta, a 40-year-old neurosurgeon, falls in love. She leaves her shining American career behind and returns to Budapest to start a new life with the man she loves. But she waits for him at the Liberty Bridge in vain - he does not appear at their rendezvous. Márta starts to search for him desperately, but when she finally finds him, the love of her life claims that they have never met before.

In 1913, an orphaned young woman arrives in Budapest to take up employment as a milliner at the hat store that belonged to her late parents but becomes mired in a search for a brother she had never known of.

A sea captain makes a bet in a cafe with a friend that he will marry the first woman who walks in.

The story of three women - a famous prostitute, her housekeeper and their new maid - living in Budapest of 1910s, whose passionate, bizarre and complex relationship can only lead to one thing: murder.

1989 is an important year in the political history of Hungary. However, Petya and his friends couldn't care less. They are about to graduate high school. The only important things to them are the parties, girls, making some easy cash. And of course, passing the upcoming exam with the leaked questions.

In 1919, Hungarian Communists aid the Bolsheviks' defeat of Czarists, the Whites. Near the Volga, a monastery and a field hospital are held by one side and then the other.

Muggy heat, small-town bleakness, unspoken social problems, hierarchy fights. This is Tuzko town, somewhere in Hungary, nowadays. Here comes Misi who inherits his grandfather's house and his property. Misi is a disillusioned, frustrated, constantly refugee young man. He can't find his role in his life, his job and relationship. He starts to build and renovate the house with some men from the town, but it violates the local oligarch's interests. Hard struggle begins for the property, for the love and for the life.

The true story of an unlikely romance in a Soviet labor camp.

Biopoic of actor Győző Szabó's younger years struggling with his drug addiction.

2123. Faced with diminishing resources, the human race can only survive through a trade-off: at the age of 50, every citizen is gradually turned into a tree. When Stefan discovers that his beloved wife Nora has voluntarily signed up for donating her own body before her time, he sets out on an adventurous journey to save her at all costs.

A switchman at a seaside railway witnesses a murder but does not report it after he finds a suitcase full of money at the scene of the crime.

Peter returns to his Transilvanian hometown, Valan, where a dead body was found in the snow-capped mountains. The investigation about his 22 years missing sister leads him to the maze of grave sins of present and the past, where he has to fight not only with local criminals but his own demons too.

Budapest, Hungary, Christmas 1957. The state, insecure after the defeated revolution of 1956 and increasingly put under the influence of a renewed Stalinist atmosphere, has decreed that all security officials must pass an exam to verify their loyalty. But to be actually effective in a shadowy world where suspicion and secrets reign, the subjects must be unaware that they are being tested.

During the ill-fated Hungarian revolution of 1956, Karcsi Szabo, star player on the water polo team, is torn between his love for a revolutionary student and his training for the Melbourne Olympics.

Death does not select, man does. Set in Budapest, Heavenly Shift offers an eerie insight into the everyday lives of a rather extraordinary ambulance crew. The films main character is Milan, a young refugee from the Balkan War, who joins a team of paramedics but inadvertently ends up involved in the funeral business in order to finance his fiancee s rescue from the hostilities.

33-years old Tamás Merthner is heartbroken, after his girlfriend Anna, who is on a scholarship in Paris, breaks up with him. While wallowing in self-pity, Tamás takes a trip down memory lane to figure out if love only exists when it's practically gone. As he's trying to pick up the pieces, he begins to realize what makes this current society so confused, which gives us a highly subjective view of Hungary's present.

In Budapest, two rival gangs of young boys lay claim to a vacant lot. The hostilities escalate yet never quite boil over into actual violence.

An old woman flies past six floors after jumping from the roof of her apartment block. Six stories on the poor state of humanity, told with humour and rare imagination to the accompaniment of a pulsating soundtrack from Amon Tobin. A woeful burlesque set in the present by one of Europe’s most original contemporary filmmakers.

Ten-year-old Palkó has just moved home to Budapest from Berlin and observes the daily life of an ordinary Hungarian elementary school with confused amazement. Juci, the young teacher just started working there. She is the only one who understands Palkó, as in their own way, they are both suffering from the same, sometimes grotesque educational system.

During the Cold War, the secret service of Kádár began a more dangerous state security game than ever before.

It’s summer in Budapest, high school student Abel is struggling to focus on his final exams, whilst coming to the realisation that he is hopelessly in love with his best friend Janka. The studious Janka has her own unrequited love with married history teacher Jakab—who had a previous confrontation with Abel’s conservative father. The tensions of a polarised society come unexpectedly to the surface when Abel’s history graduation exam turns into a national scandal.

Shortly after the end of World War II, a con man on the run finds himself in a passionate love affair that may well cost him his life.

Rudi, a polite and quiet office hand, shares a special bond with his elderly grandpa. When Grandpa falls victim to a uniquely heartless phone scam that breaks his spirit and his health, Rudi decides he’s not going to let the petty criminals get away with it. But in order to get close to them, he needs to step far out of his comfort zone and turn into a different person. With a band of grey-haired allies on his side, he might just get to the scammers before it’s too late…

Tibor and Niki, father and daughter. The young girl was only five years old when they last saw each other, before Tibor was sent to prison. He is released seven years later and tries not to think about the past. Yet he can’t erase his daughter from his life and so they are compelled to start over from the beginning. Both are irresistibly charismatic, headstrong and irascible, but also determined to find a way back to one another.

The entire village is obsessed with the championship: the establishment team, led by the mayor and his deputy, expects to win, while for the first time the poorest youths from the local Roma settlement, led by a recently released “golden‐footed” ringleader and joined by the juggling church priest, also enter the competition. Both sides hunger for victory, and when a mysterious millionaire offers to fly the top players to Brazil, the stakes skyrocket. The tournament becomes a fight not just for the title but for the village’s social balance.

Tibor Malkáv is an andaverage 37-year-old man, who though not rich, leads a comfortable and uncomplicated life. All this changes when he finds out his mother is dying of cancer and the cost of surgery is well beyond his means. A one-eyed man known as the Cyclops offers Tibor a solution to his financial woes, however, there is a catch and Tibor has to kill someone in return. What follows is a chain reaction that has long-lasting and unexpected results.

During a professional conference in Prague, two interpreters in the Hungarian booth hilariously vie for the attention of one listener.

The attractive, 32-year old and single Dora edits scripts for plays and is working on "Dangerous Liaisons." One day when her lover shoves her, half-naked, out on a balcony at the sudden appearance of the wife that Dora didn't know he had, Dora is rescued by a handsome man named Tamas.

A tale of twin girls, Dóra and Lili, who are born in 1880 Budapest at the same moment Thomas Edison presents his electric lightbulb to the world. The sisters are soon orphaned and separated in childhood, and follow different paths: one grows up to be a naïvely idealistic, bomb-toting anarchist, the other a pampered, hedonistic courtesan. Their paths cross once again on the Orient Express on New Year's Eve 1899...

During a film course lead by Yvette Biro at the Hungarian Academy of Drama and film in 1995, the director students were shown a black-and-white photo taken by Lucien Herve in 1952, and they were given the task of writing a short film based on it. Three women are standing at the outskirts of a village, looking out of the picture in the same direction. This six-minute one-shot film shows what the Herve photo does not.

István, a király ("Stephen, the King") is a Hungarian rock opera written by Levente Szörényi (music) and János Bródy (lyrics), based on the life of Saint Stephen of Hungary. The storyline was based on the play Ezredforduló (Turn of the Millennium) by Miklós Boldizsár, who co-wrote the libretto. The opera was first staged in 1983 on an open-air stage in Budapest. This first performance was also made into a 1984 film, directed by Gábor Koltay, and its music released on an album. The musical became a smash hit and is still very popular in Hungary and among Hungarian minorities in neighboring countries.

Using almost no dialogue, the film follows a number of residents (both human and animal) of a small rural community in Hungary – an old man with hiccups, a shepherdess and her sheep, an old woman who may or may not be up to no good, some folk-singers at a wedding, etc. While most of the film is a series of vignettes, there is a sinister and often barely perceptible subplot involving murder.

Sibiu, December 1989. In the chaos and panic generated by the protests of the crowd against the authorities, a unit of the militia becomes the target of a violent assault that escalates into a bloody confrontation between soldiers, militiamen, security agents, and civilians. Trying to escape the siege, Captain Viorel of the militia is captured and accused of being a terrorist.

In the aftermath of World War II, a Hungarian teenager, captured by Soviet troops, forms an unlikely bond with a Russian soldier in a remote prison camp.

A man who lost his wife and daughter in the Holocaust and a girl who lost her parents meet. Knowing each other′s emptiness, they become like father and daughter. It is the beginning of a sad love that the world cannot accept.

When middle-aged Kata realises that her life will only be complete if she has a baby of her own, her longstanding-but-married boyfriend Joska refuses to comply. But by developing an unlikely friendship with the angst-ridden teenage orphan Anna, who is also involved in a controversial relationship, Kata discovers aspects of herself, and her role as a woman, that have gone unexamined throughout her entire, lonely life.

In 1960s Hungary, an introverted teenager’s life is turned upside down by a few days in the company of his coat hanger salesman uncle: a roguish charmer with a zest for life and a weakness for horse racing and women.

The fresh president of Hungary find himself in trouble with taxi drivers. The taxi drives are disappointed in the democracy and protesting against the drasticly raising gas prices. The drivers build blockades all over the capital.

The Toth family resides in Northern Hungary. The couple has a daughter and a son, the latter a member of the armed forces. When his weary major is ordered to take a vacation, the son talks him into a visit to his family home. Comedy ensues when the Toths go overboard trying to make things pleasant for the visiting major in hopes of an easier life for their son the soldier.

After the failure of the Kossuth's revolution of 1848, people suspected of supporting the revolution are sent to prison camps. Years later, partisans led by outlaw Sándor Rózsa still run rampant. Although the authorities do not know the identities of the partisans, they round up suspects and try to root them out by any means necessary.