Synopsis: News quickly spreads of the murder of a Romany family in a Hungarian village. The perpetrators have escaped and nobody claims to know who might have committed the crime. For another Romany family living close by, the murder only serves to confirm their latent, carefully repressed fears. Far away in Canada the head of the family decides that his wife, children and their grandfather must join him as soon as possible. Living in fear of the racist terror that surrounds them and feeling abandoned by the silent majority, the family tries to get through the day after the attack. By nightfall when darkness descends on the village the family pushes the beds closer together than usual. Yet their hope of escaping the madness proves illusory. Based on an actual series of killings in Hungary that claimed the lives of eight people in less than a year, Bence Fliegauf portrays the pogrom-like atmosphere which breeds such violence. The camera stays hot on the heels of the protagonists, making the breathless escalation of events physically palpable. [Synopsis courtesy of Berlin International Film Festival]
After making the creepy sci-fi love story “Womb” with Eva Green in English, Hungarian director Benedek “Bence” Fliegauf returns to his home country and a much more realistic register with “Just the Wind.” Inspired by true events that occurred a couple of years ago, the film looks at the last day of a Romany family — composed of a mother (Katalin Toldi), her adolescent daughter (Gyongyi Lendvai) and her younger brother (Lajos Sarkany) — in a country where casual racism and verbal hatred of the Gypsy community have become such an accepted part of life that no one, not even the police and, to an...
Read More »The Toronto International Film Festival continues through next weekend, but Indiewire has already reviewed a significant portion of the program at various other festivals over the past year.
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