Directors from more than 30 countries submitted 210 films to the Slow Film Festival, held between July 26 and August 1. All of them were included on the festival programme, which made for a spectral selection, though this year the scales may have tipped under the load.
The festival opened with József Sipos's rendering of the Sándor Marai novel Esther's Inheritance. But it was films from France that dominated the first two days of the festival.
French directors submitted the most films for this year's Slow Film Festival, as for last year's festival, said festival director Lajos Kiss.
Among the highlights of the festival was Orangelove, by the Ukrainian Alan Badoyev. Despite its VHS video-like quality, it was a gem, a diamond in the rough.
The Vietnamese-born French filmmaker Gaelle Vu Binh Giang brought perhaps the most typical of the festival's films: Snow, a 150-minute family history that is at once too long yet too short.
The four main prize winners at the festival - determined by a jury of the film critic György Báron, the director Károly Duló and the director and cinematographer Péter Erős - were Angels Die in the Soil, by the Iranian director Babak Amini, in the shorts category; Rock Monologue, by the Russian Vladimir Kozlov, in the feature-length documentary category; the Hungarian Csilla Hajosi Szabó's Panelkocka (Panel Cube), about life in a Socialist-era pre-fabricated housing estate, in the short documentary category; and Az árulásról (About Betrayal), a film by Zoltán Hajdú Farkas that took the top prize.
The Slow Film Festival's best films will be shown in Gyergyószentmiklós between August 4 and 6.
Author: Éva Kelemen
