Hungarian Contemporary Animation
Curated by Orsolya Láng
Orsolya Láng curated a program of eight new shorts that reads like a visual essay on the mental state of young Hungarians today. They have an exquisite eye for the random accidents and unsolved mysteries of everyday life. There is a sadness in their view of urban existence and they dream of places far away and long ago. Decisions need to be taken, directions chosen, but they can’t seem to make up their mind. No choice is better than the other. In the end, they – but what end? Most of these films don’t reach a conclusion. They are suspended in ambiguity. ‘My selection was based on subjective criteria,’ Orsolya Láng said afterwards. ‘I prefer work that mirrors our questions: my generation does not know where to go next, how to get out of the situation we are in.’ Her own film, Off Season, is a fine example: in a desolate beachtown, drawn in almost desperate detail, summer is far away, and love remains a promise that never arrives.
Many of the animators in this program were fellow students at the Moholy Nagy university of art and design. Their work was shown at Primanima, a festival for first and student films in a small town outside of Budapest, where Láng is part of the team. ‘The animation department of the university is very good,’ said Láng. ‘The director is an animator himself, and we were guided by an excellent dramaturg and consulent.’ The results are astonishing. The films we got to see were visually mature, in all their diversity. They excelled in intrigue and tension, fortified by inventive sound and editing. Volcano Island by Anna Kata Lovrity was beautiful in its full-screen compositions of wild life under the rumbling volcano. Ebond by Judit Wunder a playful, melancholy fable of love and cats. In Not Yet by Timea Varga, with its weird jumble of visual styles, a little boy and his mother drift through life like strangers. Take Me Please by Olivér Hegyi is as disoriented and messed up, in both content and style, as the sad boy who cannot make his mind up and ends up in – well, where exactly? Hungarian contemporary animation might not be the happiest place in the world right now, but its beauty is undeniable.
