A man, a woman, an afternoon, a city, and an unspoken, hopeful desire to find love by way of the personal ads. A milestone of Hungarian cinema, Elek uses documentary techniques in a fiction context to make the frailty of everyday life as palpable as possible.

Persuaded by the janitor's wife, a lively, but lonesome old woman, who is only attached to the world through her cherished objects and memories, decides to exchange her two-room apartment for a smaller one. For a little while her everyday life is changed. She meets and entertains new people every day.

An orphan girl suffers abuse from her adoptive parents.

For this austere, clear and sharp telefeature, Judit Elek focused on the last months of Martinovics’ life: his interrogation by the Austrians, the examining Magistrate Schilling in particular, shown as a battle of wits as well as delusions on both sides. Elek had wanted to make this film in the early 1970s, but wasn’t allowed to. When she finally got the chance, the reactions were predictable, as the parallels with recent Hungarian history were simply too obvious for officialdom not to feel anxious. History may not repeat itself, but the variations look eerily similar.

In 1866, the Szendrey family gathers for the name-day of Júlia’s sister, Mária, but the event dissolves into bitter grievances and the physical decline of the household. As the dying widow of the poet Sándor Petőfi, Júlia struggles with a failed second marriage while Mária grapples with jealousy over her own husband’s love for Júlia. The family’s fragile unity finally shatters under the suffocating weight of Sándor’s heroic legacy and the pervasive shadow of illnesses.

This two-part film examines the plight of the working class. In part one, an elderly factory laborer goes to work in his last days before he is forced to retire. He leaves the factory life he has always known and goes home to his wife. In the second part, a young farm boy goes off to an industrial trade school to prepare for the very work the old man left behind. The old man loses his freedom by forced retirement while the young man loses his freedom by becoming a worker faced with a lifetime of factory work.

Erno Fisch, the film's protagonist, was born in 1903 in Sighet, the same small town as his world-famous compatriot, Elie Wiesel. Erno Fisch was the only Jew in his town that survived the Holocaust. He escaped deportation by hiding in the forest for six months. From his memories, we find out about everyday life in the area, which later became a part of Romania. Erno Fisch lived in an era when being Jewish did not mean being different, and when he could go to a Catholic school, just because it was closer. His life-story exemplifies the fact that resignation is not the only answer to the challenges of life and history.

The film sums up the results of a massive endeavour in historical restoration and reconstruction, then recording Elek became engaged with: that of the Chasidic songs Hungarian/Romanian composer Max/Miksa/Mihai Eisikovits wrote down in 1938-39 – purely phonetically, without knowing either Yiddish or Hebrew or Aramaic.

In March 1974, Hungarian television recorded a concert by Tamás Cseh and Ad Libitum as a live concert for two days (16-17) in the largest lecture hall of the Budapest University of Technology in front of a crowded student audience. The recording was made in black and white on magnetic tape by a car that drove up to the building.

A look at the present use of several Hungarian castles whose former owners in some cases are still around, but kept out of sight for being relics of a society the new rulers finished off.