Upthrown Stone - Feldobott kő

Sándor Sára, HU, 1968, Lajos Balázsovits, Nadesda Kazassian, Todor Todorov

BW ⁄ 91' ⁄ Ov St: FR - NL

Director and cinematographer Sándor Sára’s first feature film is an extraordinary modernist production and autobiographical work from the Hungarian new wave. The film is about the great taboo subjects of the time from the point of view of a student who is preparing to become a film director: internment, starvation and the situation of the Gypsies.

In the 1950s, Balázs Pásztor's (Lajos Balázsovits) father (János Pásztor), a railwayman, is interned for a minor misdemeanour and is refused admission to university for "political reasons". The son, who wants to become a film director, becomes a land surveyor and starts to build a farmhouse with a Greek partisan, Ilias, and his beautiful wife. The peasants take them to task for the false promises of the state, and their idealistic devotion soon ends in tragedy. Later, Balázs also sees the plight of the Gypsies, and his doubts about socialism grow.

Legendary cinematographer Sándor Sára boldly tackles the taboo themes of the 1960s in his first feature as director. The Upthrown Stone is divided into three chapters, each one dissecting a burning issue that Hungarian society was deeply silent about in the 1960s. In the first, the unlawful internment and the forced confessions by beatings are revealed, while the second deals with the forcible expropriation of peasants' land by the state. Sára uses a clever cinematic language trick, using the lens of the land surveyor to turn peasant life upside down, suggesting that the world in which the regime that rules in the name of workers and peasants exploits and dispossesses them of their land is completely out of kilter. Sára also reproches the Rákosi dictatorship for László Rajk's conceptual lawsuit, and he does not gloss over the prejudices of the peasantry - the hatred against the Greek that turns to violence. His sensitivity towards the less fortunate social strata is turned into an angry pleading in chapter three, when Gypsies living in abject poverty are shaved bald in the name of "lice removal".