It’s (beyond) official: I love Hungarian movies.

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Tonight, I walked up the street to see Kaméleon (and hear from its director, Krisztina Goda) at the Annenberg Theater in the Palm Springs Art Museum. Whilst buying film fest tickets on Sunday, I chose this movie for two closely related reasons: a) it looked totally bad ass, and b) it was Hungarian.


Yeah, I've got a thing for Hungarian movies, and it's not because of Vascora, a "comedy" that I saw at ShortFest earlier this year. (Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed Vascora... but it was kind of odd and not all that funny.)


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Rather, my first true Hungarian cinematic love was the 2003 film Kontroll, a dark thriller that takes place in the Budapest subway system that each Flinn class gets to know so well.


Ironically, though, I was actually quite far away from the familiar da-da-DA-duh of the BP metro when I first heard about Kontroll.


I was actually in the city of Pécs in southern Hungary, where we had a pretty epic homestay. For this part of the trip, I was paired up with my Flinn classmate Wayne and we were hosted by the wonderful Ági, who introduced us to her family, took us on our very first Tesco shopping experience, showed us the sights and also took us to a street race — not to be confused with the later experience in Romania when I almost died in a Dacia.


Anyway, I believe it was toward the end of this eventful stay that the three of us were walking down a street in Péecs, and Wayne (who was and is a film buff) started chatting up Ági about Hungarian movies: Are a lot of movies made in Hungary? What types of films are popular? et cetera, et cetera.


And I remember him asking Ági something along the lines of "If I could only see one Hungarian movie, what's the best one?"


Her answer: Kontroll. It was very popular, a box-office success in Hungary and very well done, I think she said of the film as she described the basic setting and plot outline.


Well, though I'm no film buff by any stretch of the imagination, I committed that title to memory and did some Googling once I got back to the states. And luckily enough, by June 2005, this '03 film had finally and miraculously made its way not only into American distribution but also secured a spot in our very own hometown Valley Art theater in Tempe.


A delegation of us '04 Flinns went to see it, reminisce about Eastern Europe and also arm wrestle at Taco Bell, apparently.


Soon afterward (or was it before?) I ordered the DVD from Amazon.com, and Kontroll has been one of those movies that I make my friends watch ever since.


And to think that I might have never seen one of my favorite movies and would've likely passed up a great one tonight had it not been for Wayne's questioning and Ági's answering. So to both of you, I raise a metaphorical shot glass of pálinka or ţuică or whatever it was that Ági offered Wayne from her fridge in Pécs almost five years ago.

1/12/2010 23:13