On Body and Soul

Ildikó Enyedi's On Body and Soul (Testről és lélekről) won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2017 (Hungary's first Golden Bear win in over half a century) alongside multiple international festival prizes and the Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. The film consolidated Enyedi, after her earlier My Twentieth Century (1989) which had won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes, in a long-overdue return to international prominence after a substantial mid-career absence from feature filmmaking.

Two reserved slaughterhouse employees in the suburbs of Budapest (Endre (Géza Morcsányi), the introverted financial director with a partly-paralysed arm, and Mária (Alexandra Borbély), the new shy quality inspector) discover, through the office's mandated psychological-evaluation programme, that they share the same dream every night: they are a stag and a doe, wandering peacefully through a snowy forest together. The film follows their slow attempt to translate that shared dream-life into actual waking-life intimacy.

Máté Herbai's photography of the slaughterhouse interior environments, the Budapest suburban exteriors, and the recurring slow-motion forest sequences combine into one of the most distinctive Hungarian-language productions of recent years. The film operates simultaneously as character study, sustained meditation on what physical-shyness costs in adult connection, and quietly distinctive piece of contemporary European magical-realism.