The first episode of the Private Hungary series tells the Bartos family Saga: a talented amateur filmmaker Zoltán Bartos, a chanson composer and lumber businessman made more than five hours of 9,5mm amateur film from the late twenties until the mid sixties. In 1944 the Hungarian “Quisling government” plundered the half Jewish Bartos family. Following the Nazi period, surviving the war in a Forced Jewish Labor unite, Zoltán divorced and remarry. Later the Communists rage the Hungarian citizen's life; in 1949 his plant was nationalized and lost everything again, except his humor.

Archival footage: Zoltán Bartos; Music: Zoltán Bartos and Tibor Szemző; Film editor: Márta Révész

With an 8mm camera, a secret film diary was shot between 1936 and 1966 by Jenő, who could have perhaps been the one of the best cameraman of his age, had he not worked until 1945 as the senior officer of General Mortgage Credit Bank. The main actors of the Tabán spleen are Dusi and Jenő and the city itself, in snow, fog and rain, after the siege. This film is a sensitive memento of the vanishing life style of the 1930’s Hungarian middle class.

Sensual and unconscious, perhaps this is the best metaphor characterizing a “neo-Freudian-slip” film. Hungarian petite-bourgeois families find protection from the terror of communism in their private sphere and the ancient human dramas, muffled amorous dependencies, the hardly visible, but yet palpable relationships are grasped by the viewers’ eyes through coming into sight meditatively. In private life, everything goes on even if the spontaneous actors do not see what they look at. This film is exactly what it seems to be: the never before seen denouncer of invisible and sensual relationships.

If, by luck, eternal love and world war do not cross each other's path, an idyllic life can be the reward. The film is the story of our heroes Mr. N and Ilona: drama and love embedded in history. Through the lens of 9.5 mm camera of Mr. N, the meticulous military engineer of Catholic faith, we follow the events as they were taking place from 1938 his private life –factory – public life triangle. All happens under the shadow of the historic drama of Europe. Mr. N’s evocative shots of the re-annexation of former Upper-Hungary – after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia - following the revision of the Trianon Peace Treaty 1938. Mr. N’s boss, the convivial army contractor bears an awful resemblance to Rákosi, the communist dictator of later times... Mr. N has a special documentary message to us, comprising thirty years in the life of Hungary, visions of terror and dictatorships, peaceful home life and the 1956 revolution. A Hungarian family: they are looking at each other, at outsiders, and as we are looking at them, the hidden similarity of things dawns upon us.

A travelogue that documents the Jewish exodus from Slovakia just before the beginning of World War II. In two boats, a group of nine hundred Slovak and Austrian Jews tried to reach the Black Sea on the Danube in order to get to Palestine from there. The returning boat witnesses the exodus of Bessarabian Germans, fleeing to the Third Reich from the Soviet invasion of Bessarabia. The film features the amateur films of Captain Nándor Andrásovits, the captain of one of the boats.