Movie about Ákos debuted in Rome
On June 14, 2023, within the framework of the Roma, a portrait festival, the Collegium Hungaricum Rome (commonly known as the Accademia d'Ungheria in Roma) hosted the premiere of Ákos's short film We Are Left Alone in Italy. Before the film screening, Gábor Kudar, the director of the Collegium Hungaricum Rome, gave a short introduction, and after the screening, he talked with the director, Ákos Kovács Sebesty Terdik.
Ákos is one of Hungary's leading pop music performers, singer, songwriter, lyricist, with 34 years of unbroken success behind him. He has sold more than a million records and recorded more than a thousand concerts, but he has also composed music for museums, theater performances and films. He has a degree in economics, runs his own record label and recording studio, has published several books of poems and short stories, and is the father of four children.
Last April, Ákos presented himself in a new genre in addition to his musical career: he made his first film. He wrote the script for the 27-minute short film entitled MAGUNK MARADTUNK (We Are Left Alone) from his own short story, he directed the film, and he also scored the soundtrack.
Shortly after its premiere in April 2022, the work won the Zsigmond Vilmos Hungarian Director Award in the short film category, made it to the finals of the Hungarian Motion Picture Festival, and was also recognized at numerous international festivals - from Brno to Bucharest, from Milan to Avezzano, from Shanghai to Toronto.
The short film made in 2022 is a monologue of a taxi driver. The driver cruises and the viewer listens to him as a passenger. The aging person tries to understand the world around him, and his own place in it. In his texts, personal confessions and experiences on a historical scale are mixed. The recalled memories come to life on the streets of Budapest, and the driver does not even notice that he is living the images of his life in front of his passenger. Simple objects, lonely buildings and correspondence spanning a lifetime, human destinies appearing in memorable looks guide the viewer in this lyrical short film. The basis of the film is a Central European, real Hungarian story, which also draws from the family events of the screenwriter-director. "The families of those who live in this area have been tossed here and there by history," says the director. Short, dense scenes flash back to the reconstruction after the Second World War, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and War of Independence, the events of 2006 or the problems of the dissidents. Ákos' short film, made from his own short story, is at the same time a driving force behind the golden age of Hungarian cinema and classics such as Andrej Tarkovsky or Wim Wenders.