Friday 7 May 2010

SUNSHINE (1999)

3rd Hungarian Film Showcase in London

"Somewhere in the World"

22-28 June 2010







Sunshine / A napfény íze (1999)

Director: István Szabó


"Istvan Szabo, one of Hungary's most celebrated film makers, attained international fame with his 1981 German-language film Mephisto, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. But to a broad Hungarian public, as well as to film specialist abroad, Szabo had been well-known since the mid-1960s, when he began his career. His 1999 film Sunshine, starring Ralph Fiennes, Jennifer Ehle, Rachel Weisz, and other English-speaking actors, returns to a historical preoccupations of his earlier films and covers the whole period that has fascinated him throughout his career.



The film tells the history of a Jewish family in Hungary from the late 19th century to the present, with the greatest emphasis on the "golden age" of pre-World War I in Vienna and Budapest, and the grim decades that followed.


Exile was a crucial question for many Hungarians of Szabo's generation (and earlier generations as well), and filmmaking is of course central to Szabo's life. Perhaps the most interesting aspects are his reflections on Jewish identity in Hungary and Central Europe, and on his own family's relation to that identity."

/Source: http://www.kinokultura.com/specials/7/ssi-szabo.shtml, by Susan Rubin Suleiman, 2008. This is intro on the website is followed by a lenghty conversation between Ms Suleiman and Istvan Szabo./


Sunshine Trailer





No comments: