Szerelem

Love
a film by Károly Makk

Set in Budapest in 1953, János has been imprisoned on a false charge as a political dissident and sentenced to ten years. His young wife Luca does not even know if he is still alive. She frequently visits his bedridden mother and in an attempt to sustain her in her last few months, tells the elderly woman that her favourite son is in America, pursuing a successful career as a filmmaker. She fabricates letters supposedly from János telling his news and then listens impassively while his mother reads her the details. Luca herself is dismissed from her teaching job because of her and her husband's political beliefs.

During the exchanges between the two women we read the thoughts and memories of the mother, shown in brief flashbacks – photographs, events from her past or her imagined past – repeated sequences of images, details and textures of stunning beauty. As the dying woman's days grow bleaker, Luca struggles to keep her spirits up. She has also to contend with her own desperate loneliness, relying increasingly on the support of the mother's housekeeper, Irén. Finally, János is freed and he travels home almost in dread of what he might find there.

Makk's haunting and atmospheric film from 1971, brilliantly shot by János Tóth, captures exactly the fear and uncertainty of the time and is a treatise on how such times affect fidelity, faith, illusion and love. It explores, unsentimentally, a love composed of fortitude and forbearance, restraint and fear, with the belief that you may meet again, and the acceptance that you may not.

Mirror

Zerkalo
a film by Andrei Tarkovsky

In this, his most autobiographical work, legendary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky creates a profound and compelling masterpiece in which he reflects upon his own childhood and the destiny of the Russian people. With its unstructured and inconsistent movement back and forth through time, and its extraordinary and mesmerisingly beautiful images, it is cinema in its purest form, experienced as emotion rather than by intellect.

What began as a planned series of interviews with his own mother, evolved into a lyrical and complex circular meditation on love, loyalty, memory, and history. Often, a person's memories are vague, inconsistent and illogical, with little distinction between concrete memories, dream logic, and isolated events experienced as a child. Time shifts, generations merge, and the film's many layers establish the links which connect people – intertwining real life and family relationships with recollections of childhood, dreams and nightmares – images, episodes, and the sense of desperately clinging to something that has lost all meaning.

Tarkovsky's own memories as well as those of his mother are intermingled, as a dark, sumptuous, and dreamlike pre-World War II Russia is evoked, accompanied throughout by the voice of his father, the poet Arseny Tarkovsky, reading his own elegiac poetry. Tarkovsky transmutes the love he felt for his own wife into his father's love for his mother.

The spectacle of nature and its ubiquitous and ever-shifting presence is magically captured by the camera – the family cabin nestled deep in the verdant woods, a barn on fire in the middle of a gentle rainstorm, a gigantic wind enveloping a man as he walks through a field of long grass – all creating indelible images with deep, if mysterious emotional resonance. As time shifts between the narrator's generation and his mother's, archive newsreel footage of Russian wars, triumphs and disasters are juxtaposed with imagined scenes from the past, present and future, crafting a silently lucid cinematic panorama of memory, history, and nature.

Laissez-Passer

Safe Conduct
a film by Bertrand Tavernier

Based on true events, the story depicts one of France's most controversial periods in history – the early 1940s during the Nazi occupation – against the background of the French film industry. It follows two men who struggle to maintain their integrity while working for the German controlled Continental Film Studios. Aurenche is a writer with a complicated love life who injects his scripts with subversive messages, while assistant director Devaivre uses his position as a cover for his increasingly hazardous activities with the Resistance. The film vividly recreates the day-to-day danger, fear and uncertainty of wartime France.

Paris, March 1942, and the victorious German occupying power demands that France pay a colossal financial contribution, 400 million francs a day, to the German war effort. Continental Films, a German controlled production company founded in 1940 in Paris by Albert Greven, is a snare similar to the one into which the French nation has already fallen. Should French technicians agree to work for Continental? Is it a hiding place 'in between the wolf's fangs, where it cannot bite you', or is it equivalent to collaborating with the enemy?

Jean Devaivre is an assistant director who joins Continental as the best possible cover for his Resistance activities. He is a man of action, rash, impulsive and daring. Jean Aurenche, a scriptwriter and poet, uses every possible excuse to turn down any offers of work from the Germans. He is watchful, insatiable, curious and torn between his three mistresses. Above all, he is an observer who resists when he takes up his pen and writes. Their professional and personal circles include dozens of other people, some resigned to their country's fate, others who carry on the struggle. There are fighters and collaborators, but in German-occupied France, they all have to combat hunger, cold and petty restrictions simply to survive. The film is dedicated to those who lived through this time.

Writer/director Bertrand Tavernier on the making of the film:
"Were things as black and white as people subsequently made out? Where do you draw the line between collaboration, survival and resistance? No film has ever dealt with these issues. Laissez-Passer is set during the German occupation but it is not a war film. The dramatic tension comes from the energy, rhythm and multiple contradictory sentiments – comedy, tragedy, emotion – that ricochet off each other within a single scene. The story is full of paradoxes. I really wanted to show the significance of each choice. I wanted to show that there were various forms of resistance during those four years."