Two Half-Times in Hell

Zoltán Fábri's film is set in a Hungarian labour camp. The Germans decide to stage a football match between the prisoners and their own soldiers for Hitler's birthday, and the job of assembling the team goes to Ónodi, a well known player from before the war. Ónodi takes the football seriously and genuinely trains his side, though his real plan is to use the day of the match to escape. The film puts the dignity of sport and the arithmetic of survival onto the same pitch. Its inspiration is the match played in Kyiv in 1942 and remembered as the death match, which Fábri moved to Hungary. The Soviet-era account that the players were shot for winning was disproved by later archival work: the arrests came months afterwards and on other grounds.