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At the initiative of the Hungarian National Film Archive, we celebrate the Day of Hungarian Film on April 30 every year, commemorating the 1901 premiere of the first Hungarian film, Béla Zsitkovszky's 'The Dance'. This year, on this occassion we screen online Péter Bacsó's movie 'Oh, Bloody Life'.
In 1951, a tractor rumbles on the stage of the Budapest Operetta Theater, reviving Hungarian Stalinism, while hens are scratching and skewing as the young operetta actress sings onstage, "I am the tractor girl and the Party sent me to you", then solves the all the troubles of the operetta village. The piece is good, critics are raving about it, but the actress is still deported somewhere god-forgotten place, in a house of a kulak. The reason: her ex-husband was an aristocrat. The actress suddenly finds herself on a train in the company of former Hungarian nobility, terrified barons, counts, shop and factory owners, Horthy military officers and other people who are too arrogant to take in a representative of the entertainment industry, but too jealous to leave her alone ...
"Oh, Bloody Life, You Silly Life! Giving up on You, My God, How Hard!" they sing in the operetta. But should you? The satire of Péter Bacsó tells with excellent humor and well-dosed seriousness about the absurd world in which the police chief of the village is the master of life and death and in which it is difficult to preserve your humanity in order to survive the oppression of the regime.
In collaboration National Film Institute Hungary - Film Archive, the film will be screened online with Estonian subtitles. For the link and password of the screening, please register at the link to the right. Deadline for registration is April 30, 2021, 12:00.
See the trailer of the movie here:
