The films come from 27 countries and include 36 premieres.
The Hungarian director Béla Tarr will open the festival. Two short documentaries -- From a Night Porter's Point of View (1977), a film by the polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski that shows a metaphor of Communism, and Views of a Retired Night Porter (2006), in which the Austrian director Andreas Horvath revisits the subject of Kieslowski's film - will show at the opening gala.
The International Panorama section of the festival will show 30 contemporary, creative documentaries, among them Citizen Havel, a public and private portrait of Václav Havel; Mechanical Love, a look at the interaction between humans and robots; Brides of Allah, which examines the motivation of women in prison for participating in terrorist attacks on Israel; and The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World, about the West Lake Restaurant in Changsha, China, which is the biggest Chinese restaurant in the world.
On the Hungarian panorama programme are Richárd Schuster's Three Missing Pages, in which Vera, who parted with her love when she was sent to a forced labour camp 60 years earlier, tells her story to her grandson.; Eszter Hajdú's The Fidesz Jew, the Mother with No Sense of Nation and Mediation, which offers a look at the political tension in Hungary today; and Péter Forgács's I Am von Höfler - Variation on Werther, which follows several generations of the great Pécs leather industry family Tibor von Höfler.
Films in competition will be evaluated by the audience. The winner will take a EUR 1,500 purse from the Open Society Institute.
Tickets for individual films on the festival programme may be purchased for between HUF 650 and HUF 800 apiece. A pass to all of the films may be bought for HUF 4,000 before the festival and for HUF 4,500 after it starts.
Photo: mechanicallove.com
