Faithless - A Hungarian Film By Lajos Koltai

Featuring Daniel Craig as you've never seen him before. Simply because you haven't seen him before Casino Royale anyway!

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 inaugural day, Fateless, directed by Lajos Koltai, will be screened at 6:00pm. The film has Marcell Nagy, Aron Dimeny & Daniel Craig playing the central characters.

In recently Nazi-occupied Budapest, Gyuri, a Jewish mop-topped 14-year-old, is warned by his father that his carefree childhood days are over - by decree, he will be forced to drop out of school and work in a factory.

Before his father’s deportation to a labor camp, Gyuri’s extended family has one last meal together, with pork as the main course - the only meat available on the black market. Around the table, rumors of death are dismissed - "Poland is different." But an elderly relative reminds the boy that, as a Jew, persecution must be endured with patience and fortitude.

On his way to work, trusting Gyuri gets off the bus after a police officer demands all those wearing yellow stars to do so. Gyuri and other boys hide in the embankment, as ordered, while the policeman rounds up more Jewish males. Even as they are being delayed to work, one boy reckons the policeman is just fooling around.

Director Lajos Koltai has taken a few tips from another Holocaust drama, Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, in the almost colorless cinematography, which becomes virtually black and white in the muddy camps. And like Adrien Brody in the Polanski film, the restrained performance of Marcell Nagy as Gyuri largely consists of observing (so much so that when Gyuri, at the war’s end, says he can’t be angry anymore, it’s never clear that he ever was).

The one exception is in the music. Ennio Morricone’s hymn-like score sounds like it could have been lifted from his work in Cinema Paradiso as it aggressively underlines Gyuri’s hope for survival.

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