Control - A Hungarian Film By Nimrod Antal

Kontroll keeps pace as a hip, flashy, fast-moving set piece by any international measure. Here's your free pass to one of the largest and oldest subway systems in the world.

The Hyderabad Film Club, in association with the Hungarian Information & Cultural Centre, New Delhi, is organising the Hungarian Film Festival, at Prasad Labs Preview Theatre, from 19th to 22nd April. Six Hungarian movies will be screened during this period.

Today the second day, Kontroll, directed by Nimrod Antal, will be screened at 6:00pm. The film has Sándor Csányi, Zoltán Mucsi, Csaba Pindroch, Sándor Badár and Zsolt Nagy playing the central characters.

The massive labyrinthine netherworld that is the Budapest subway system, provides the stunning setting for Kontroll, a high-style, high-speed romantic thriller in which the lives of assorted outcasts, lovers and dreamers intersect and collide. One handsome young hero, one mysterious maiden and one particularly nasty killer must conduct a race against time, trains and destiny itself in their frantic pursuit of one another.

The Budapest subway system, one of the largest and oldest in the world, is a place that becomes an omniscient character in this ambitious film that jumbles dark comedy, slick action and horror-movie conventions. The main character is Bulcsú (Sándor Csányi), part of a team of disheveled ticket inspectors—controllers who roam the grimy, fluorescent-lit city-under-the-city in a soul-destroying ritual.

The job has become such a part of Bulcsú that he never leaves the underground. He has taken to sleeping on empty platforms and getting progressively more unkempt as he accumulates more bruises, bloody noses and bitterness from his scraps with a variety of unseemly creatures of the night (and day).

Among the post-punk, post-communist habitués of this subterranean metropolis are a cute girl in a teddy-bear suit, a rival gang of ticket inspectors who like to play a deadly game of chicken with express trains, and a hooded inspecter who may or may not be pushing people under subway wheels at crowded stops.

First-time director Nimród Antal keenly juggles black comedy, character types and genre styles, making the most of the weird angles and inherent dark creepiness of his chosen backdrop. Kontroll keeps pace as a hip, flashy, fast-moving set piece by any international measure.

For further details, please contact Bh S S Prakash Reddy of the Hyderabad Film Club at 2373-0841/93910-20243.