My Way Home

In the last days of the war a young Hungarian named Joska is trying to get home. He has pulled on a German uniform for warmth, which is why the Red Army picks him up, and he ends up shut away in an empty place. There he is put to minding a herd of cattle with a Soviet soldier as young as he is, Kolya. They have no language in common, so whatever forms between them forms without words. Miklos Jancso's 1965 film tells the war not from the front but from across an open field. The things that would define his later work start appearing here: landscape itself turned into a means of pressure, the randomness of violence, the arbitrariness of power.