Father

The story of a young man who lost his father as a child. Takó was six when his father died. He barely remembers him. So he builds a father in his own head: the man, a doctor, becomes a resistance fighter in his imagination, saves people, performs heroics. The film shows these fantasies as if they were real. Then the boy grows up, goes to university, and at a certain point starts investigating how much of what he was told is true. That is the subject: how a private lie gets built and why it is needed. Behind it stands Hungary from the 1940s to the 1960s; a generation growing up fatherless and a country in which everyone was retelling their own past. István Szabó directed; it is the middle film of the trilogy about his own generation. The formal influence of the French new wave is visible, but the material belongs entirely to Budapest. András Bálint plays Takó and Miklós Gábor the father. It was counted among the best productions of its period in Hungary and entered the country's all-time lists. A strong example for anyone who likes European cinema and narratives built on memory. For a viewer expecting a straight story, the film moves constantly between the real and the imagined and does not announce which is which.