’Sunset’ won FIPRESCI award in Venice.
It has been 24 years that a Hungarian movie made it to the competition program of Venice Film Festival, and doing so, we instantly won a prize. ’Sunset’, the second feature film of the Oscar winner László Nemes Jeles had huge success in Venice, and now we know that critics find this movie to be the best. Sunset got the prize of FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics) although it competed in a very serious field: Sunset competed with films such as the new western of the Coen Brothers, ‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’ or the black and white family history of Alfonso Cuarón, ‘Roma and Luca Guadagnino Suspiria’.
The protagonists of the film are Juli Jakab (Írisz Leiter) and the Romanian Vlad Ivanov (Oszkár Brill) and huge part of the crew is the same who made the Son of Saul. The story takes us back to 1913, Budapest, in the heart of Europe. The young Írisz Leiter arrives in the Hungarian capital with high hopes to work as a milliner at the legendary hat store that belonged to her late parents. She is nonetheless sent away by the new owner, Oszkár Brill. While preparations are under way at the Leiter hat store, to host guests of uttermost importance, a man abruptly comes to Írisz, looking for a certain Kálmán Leiter. Refusing to leave the city, the young woman follows Kálmán’s tracks, her only link to a lost past. Her quest brings her through the dark streets of Budapest, where only the Leiter hat store shines, into the turmoil of a civilisation on the eve of its downfall.
The film has been bought by film marketers from 70 countries around the world before the world premiere. The North American premiere was on Saturday at the Toronto Film Festival, the Hungarian audience can see ’Sunset’ from 27 September in cinemas.
