Current - Sodrásban

István Gaál, HU 1963, Andrea Drahota, Marianna Moór, Istvánné Zsipi
BW ⁄ 81' ⁄ Ov St: FR - NL

Current was the first film of the Hungarian new wave. The movie is about young intellectuals of the sixties who are searching not only for their lost companion in the Tisza, but also for their place in a changing world. Pier Paolo Pasolini praised the film as one of the best in 1965.

The last summer before university. Freshly graduated young people retire to the banks of the Tisza river. They play volleyball, chase each other, goof around. They even swim into the Tisza, throwing mud from the riverbank at each other. They are having so much fun that they don't even notice that one of their companions has disappeared. In the search, they have to face their own responsibility.

Current marks a new beginning in Hungarian cinema. With István Gaál's film, it has become natural for young directors to formulate their films from their own experience, and to choose young people who are searching for their place, who behave naturally and who do not live their everyday lives according to official ideology. In Current, Gaál captures the experience of young intellectuals in the 1960s, whose parents were still farmers, but who had gone to the city, to university and who had to redefine their relationship to life and death. The disappearance of their companion becomes symbolic in Sándor Sára's disturbingly beautiful pictures, in which the chimneys of the farmhouses stretch skywards behind the peasant houses.

Modernisation, the eclipse of the rural way of life and, of course, growing up, the loss of innocence, are the themes of Current through the first encounter with death. It is also a pioneer in depicting the freer sexual life of young people without moral judgement.