Hungarian short film wins international prizes

According to indielisboa.com, Réka Bucsi, after being nominated for the Golden Berlin Bear three times, wins Short Film Grand Prize in Lisbon. Solar Walk is a 21-minute long animation created by Hungarian director Réka Bucsi and her international production group. The jury in Portugal holds “Solar Walk, by far, the most exciting film in the competition,” and compares Bucsi’s style to Andrei Tarkovsky and Stanley Kubrick. The film comes to Hungarian cinemas by the end of the year.

Indie Lisboa is an international film competition in Lisbon. The Portugal capital hosts the contest annually. This year it was held from April 26 until May 6 and surprised Hungary with several compliments and an award.

You do not speak Hungarian at all? No worries.

The award-winning piece Solar Walk uses the universal language of music and pictures.

Solar Walk is originally a 50-minute long animation without dialogues or narrations, but it was cut because of the requirements of the competition. The animation is – originally – created for the Danish Aarchus Jazz Orchestra, and thus was entirely made in and financed by Denmark.

The Hungarian director relied mainly on the production group of her previous movie, Love. The group has Americans in it, as every successful movie; Danish members, for the reasons mentioned above; and French members, as every art movie; and, obviously, a Hungarian sound designer, Péter Benjámin Lukács. Sounds like a recipe for success.

Solar Walk gives a space-travelling experience for its viewers, weird human-like animals and geometrical shapes – moreover, a Rubik’s cube! – form scenes.

The young director thinks her creation is an easy-to-absorb, easy-to-enjoy piece, while Lisbon jury compared her work to Tarkovsky’s and Kubrick’s hypnotic art films.

The short version of Solar Walk debuted in Hungary within the frames of Friss Hús Festival in Budapest in April. The longer version, as it requires an orchestra with twenty jazz musicians, which leaves the creator with a problematic situation yet to be solved, but Réka Bucsi promises it to be available in Hungary by the end of this year.

Réka Bucsi is a real risk-taker. Next time she opts to take another step out of her comfort zone and come out with a feature-length movie heavily relying on dialogues and narrations, as she announced in an interview for MNF (Hungarian National Film Fund).

It’s raining awards and prizes!

Réka Bucsi’s first short film, Symphony No. 42, was already at the 64th Berlinale, then Love was nominated two years ago, and finally, Solar Walk won the Audi Short Film Award this year. Berlinale or Berlin International Film Festival has three prizes for short films: Golden Bear (for the best one), Silver Bear and the Audi Short Film Award. Last year the Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi won the Golden Bear for On Body and Soul.

You can watch Réka Bucsi’s first short film HERE:

Source: by Éva Stölkler – guest author