The ELTE–NFI University Film Club screening and discussion series continues with another SPECIAL EDITION. We welcome university members from all ELTE faculties.
Tamás Almási's dramatic documentary film brings together political prisoners from the Kistarcsa internment camp and their former prison guards forty years later. In the final years of socialism and after the fall of communism, it became possible to talk openly about the historical traumas of the recent past. What makes Almási's film different is that he not only juxtaposes different points of view in interviews, but also personally confronts the former prison guard with his former prisoners. Twelve former prisoners recall what life was like in the Kistarcsa internment camp in the 1950s. They revisit the prison, where their former captor, ÁVH Major Piroska, also appears, and the confrontation they have been waiting for for nearly 40 years begins.
Among those reminiscing are a writer (Magda Vámos), an actress (Camilla Dévay, mother of Dorottya Udvaros), an aristocrat (Mónika Esterházy, aunt of Péter Esterházy), a staunch communist, and a kulak. What they have in common is that they were all sent to Kistarcsa on trumped-up charges, their crimes mostly amounting to having a relative or loved one declared an enemy of the regime, but there were also those who were sentenced to three years simply for kissing near Rákosi's villa.
Date: Friday, October 10, 2025, 6:00 p.m.
Venue: ELTE University Library and Archives, community space (Budapest, V. Ferenciek tere 6.)
Director: Tamás Almási
Dramaturg: Gyöngyi Bende
Cinematographers: Nyika Jancsó, Loránd Mertz, György Kováts
Editors: Katalin Halász, Béla Koncz
Composer: István Slamovits
Our guests in the post-screening discussion will be Tamás Almási, the film's Kossuth and Béla Balázs Prize-winning director, screenwriter, and cinematographer, and Tibor Zinner, historian and university professor.
Due to limited seating, advance registration is required: Ítélet nélkül (Without Judgment, documentary film by Tamás Almási, 1992).
Please send any correspondence regarding the film club to eltenfi.filmklub@elte.hu.
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