Introduction
Ferenc Kósa began his career as a director during the renewal of Hungarian cinema in the early 1960s. His graduation film, Tízezer nap (Ten Thousand Days) (1965–67), which received an award at the Cannes Film Festival, not only brought him international recognition but also established him as one of the defining figures of young Hungarian cinema. For more than a decade, he maintained a close working relationship with Sándor Sára and Sándor Csoóri. Through their socially committed, plebeian worldview, the moral values embodied in their works, and their distinctive visual formal language – both in their early joint productions and later films made with other collaborators – revived and renewed a folk-rooted national tradition within Hungarian film history, a tradition whose foundations were laid by István Szőts. For Ferenc Kósa and his contemporaries, the primary aesthetic points of reference were not the dominant Hungarian and international film canons of the 1960s and 1970s, but rather the oeuvres of Béla Bartók, and poets like Attila József, Gyula Illyés, László Nagy, and others. Among filmmakers of their own generation, the work of István Gaál and Zoltán Huszárik can also be associated with this tradition.
Worldview and Moral Vision
From Tízezer nap (Ten Thousand Days) to A másik ember (The Other Man), most of Kósa’s films draw their subjects from the turbulent currents of Hungarian history. The director turns to the past in order to address issues that remain essential to the present, choosing historical periods that can be viewed with a certain distance.
Kósa’s films are devoid of carefree escapism, of reckless summers or the serene, intimate moments of everyday life. His protagonists are responsible individuals committed to public concerns: people who are not satisfied with the world as it is but seek to bring into being what should exist. To use László Németh’s term, Kósa’s central figure is a “man of ideas”: a proactive personality who refuses to accept a fate imposed by others and who, through hard-won inner freedom – that does not exclude physical misery, suffering, or humiliation – sets a moral measure for his surroundings. Jáki in Nincs idő (No Time), the mother in Hószakadás (Blizzard), the sculptor in Guernica, and the two Bojtárs in The Other Man, all embody this ideal of moral integrity, as do the real-life public figures of András Balczó and Doctor József Béres. For them, existence is a continuous assumption of responsibility; they seek the fullness of life and pursue a truth that can never be fully attained. The moral individual is a voluntary bearer of tasks, more stubborn than “clever”; moral passion outweighs the instinct for self-preservation. In peaceful times, such a fate leads to neglect, solitude, and repeated failure; but in harsher eras to prison, bullets, or the fiery throne. As poet Gáspár Nagy wrote after the premiere of Ítélet (Judgement):
“The stirrup is a polished bracelet on our wrists:
I go to the water with defiant laughter,
with my head held firm.”
Kósa “tests” the human being in the cruel borderline situations of history, asking whether one can recognise their room for manoeuvre and capacity for action, whether one is the creator of their destiny or merely a marionette. His films are typically set in periods when choice is unavoidable, when even mistakes and delays become forms of decision, and when history inevitably presents its reckoning. To remain human is always possible, the director insists – even in a damp prison cell, even in the moment of death. At times, the demanding severity of “holding man accountable to history” is softened by the understanding gesture of “holding history accountable to man.”
Formal rigor, a coherent worldview grounded in the primacy of ethics, visionary imagery, and a mode of expression that consistently rises above the everyday and suggests discipline and inner restraint – these are the most striking features of Ferenc Kósa’s art. The director maintains that both our most personal roles and our public actions are ultimately judged by the moral credibility embodied in our deeds. “It may sound strange,” Kósa once said in an interview, “but first and foremost I am a human being, then a father, a friend, a Hungarian… and only somewhere at the very end a filmmaker. It is not celluloid that flows through my veins, but blood. Only by preserving my humanity can I make honest films, and that requires a conscious avoidance of compromise.”
The ethical perspective also determines how representatives of oppressive power are portrayed. The fault of those who subject András Balczó and Doctor Béres to public persecution lies not in holding views different from their opponents, but in the cynicism and arbitrariness that govern their conduct. The protagonists’ messianic sense of mission and their forced, Herculean assumption of responsibility are, in many respects, compelled responses to the absence of freedom. The moral worldview of the films and the historical condition that gives rise to them illuminate one another. Kósa asserts the imperative of ethical autonomy at a moment when the moral deformation of the individual and that of society mutually reinforce each other. His films do not content themselves with recording facts; through the exemplary power of the characters they evoke, they call viewers to action.
The fundamental tone of Kósa’s art is dignified and grave. Life here knows no idyll, no state of repose. Humour, when it appears at all, is never carefree; it is invariably bitter. One must endure, one must stand their ground. The cause embodied by the central figures is never merely individual: their aims are inseparable from the needs and aspirations of the communities they represent (István Széles bears the burden of the multitude; Balczó runs for the community and surrounded by the community; Jáki and his companions fight for social liberation; Bojtár stands as one among the revolutionaries). Behind the characters’ sense of mission, it is not difficult to discern the director’s own self-image, shaped and sustained by vocation.
It is well known how powerfully the idea of mission has resonated in Hungarian literature, particularly since the Reform Era (1825–1848). Sándor Petőfi called poets “pillars of fire”, a proud formulation that points to the exceptional gravity of their calling. The artist with a mission – and Ferenc Kósa is such an artist – is driven by the passion of vocation; his task is the active affirmation of social progress. Since this mandate is not purely artistic, his presence is universal: poetic and moral, political and human at once. “It is almost certain that I am not simply a poet,” Endre Ady once confessed. It is equally certain that from the very beginning of his career, Kósa Ferenc committed himself to the ideal of public responsibility in the broadest sense.
On the wall of his dormitory room he pinned lines by Attila József:
“I did not come to weep or to exhort, but to act.
Above our hearts hovers the scarcely imagined figure
of a man more social than any of us.
I must lay my flesh upon him and embed my bones within.
Is this not ‘art’? Then I whistle at ‘art’:
I want more – I want what is necessary.”
In the light of these words, the turning point in Kósa Ferenc’s life becomes intelligible: at the moment of political transition, he effectively ceased making films and entered public life as a member of parliament.
From Ballad to Parable
During his studies at the film academy, Ferenc Kósa made three student films: Etűd egy hétköznapról (Etude on an Ordinary Day), Jegyzetek egy tó történetéhez (Notes Toward the History of a Lake), A fény (The Light), after which – together with many of his generational peers – he began preparing Ten Thousand Days. Far exceeding the expectations of a debut feature, the film became one of the most significant works of Hungarian cinema in the 1960s. The writing of the screenplay was preceded by extensive field research modelled on Bartók’s and Kodály’s folk-song collecting: Kósa and his collaborators travelled across the country, uncovering destinies, events and stories of what they called “history embodied in individual lives”. The completed film was initially rejected by the authorities and additional scenes had to be shot; yet, after a series of painful compromises, the work eventually reached the Cannes Film Festival, where it received the Best Director Award.
Ten Thousand Days is, on the one hand, a dynamically flowing vision shaped into a ballad, depicting three identity-shaping decades of Hungarian history; on the other, it is the filmmakers’ collective reflection on where we come from, who we are, and where we are heading. In this first joint undertaking, Kósa, Csoóri and Sára already posed the fundamental question that would define their later work: can human beings be the creators of their own world, or are they condemned merely to endure what happens to them? How can the people of the plains become free, acting moral agents?
At the centre of the composition stand two like-minded peasant figures, István Széles and Fülöp Bánó, whose lives – sometimes bound together by friendship, sometimes drifting apart for shorter or longer periods – model the experiences of the multitude and within the multitude. Both are humiliated and embittered in the dehumanising labour market of the 1930s, yet they respond to their misery in fundamentally different ways. István Széles accepts the given order of the world; he desires nothing more than a wife, a plot of land, a house and a horse. When Ájtatos Balogh, a wealthy landowner, demands that he apologise to a pig, Széles submits without protest. Centuries of disenfranchisement and poverty, passed down from father to son, have taught people like him that everything must be endured, that the world is governed by those who own land and livestock. His character is vividly illuminated by Gyula Illyés’s words: “The people of the plains are the best material for state-building, because they are the most respectful of authority. Respect for authority is, of course, the result of education – but such ancient and thorough education that it has seeped into their blood, filtered into their nerves, and become almost instinctive.”
In Széles, the majority of the poor peasantry is typified: those who at first cannot move beyond the satisfaction of elementary needs, yet who are destined to pay the heaviest price for the sins of each era. By contrast, Fülöp Bánó chooses the path of collective action, accepting all its consequences. In the 1930s he organises strikes and takes part in political movements; later, during the organisation of cooperatives, he agitates for participation as a communist party secretary.
The axis-composed, dignified and slowly flowing images of Ten Thousand Days render visible a historical movement bent under the immense weight of accumulated pasts. The film’s defining visual planes are the close-up and the long shot: the gaze that becomes landscape, and the landscape that acquires a human face. Rejecting everyday realism in favour of a mythic evocation of folk life, the film transcends naturalistic representation at every level – from visual composition to the speech patterns of its characters. The baroque richness of its imagery arises from meticulously composed shots created with the maximal use of photographic means, allowing characteristic Hungarian landscapes, the slow transformation of village life, and the suffering, struggling people of a given historical moment to appear together within a single, unified vision.
Ferenc Kósa’s next film, Judgement, was preceded by one of the most intense press debates in Hungarian film history. After Sándor Csoóri and Ferenc Kósa published their film treatment in Új Írás cultural journal, Péter Rényi set out his concerns in a two-part article in the national daily Népszabadság. A further twenty-three responses followed – understandably drawing broad public attention to the film long before its completion.
Judgement again presents a character type who reaches himself through his contradictions. Archbishop Bakócz binds peasant leader György Dózsa by oath to a crusade against the Ottomans, but later Dózsa becomes convinced that the enemy is not to be sought elsewhere, but within the country. Clinging to the memory of Dózsa already in captivity, the film depicts the most general conflicts of revolution: the situations imposed by necessity that tower over him as inescapable contradictions. In this retrospective drama it is not only the leader of a prematurely doomed uprising who relives his earlier decisions; through his personal struggle, history holds a mirror up to itself. The outcome of events is no longer what matters – the point is to expose the laws that set these phenomena in motion. In Kósa’s film, Dózsa is at once a man thrown into the furnace of history – finite even in his greatness – and a revolutionary who assumes responsibility for the fate of others. In his reflections he asks himself to account for history, yet at the level of structure and composition this is overlaid by the director’s gesture: a sustained interrogation of history itself.
The film’s present-tense framework is that of interrogation and the reckoning. György evades Werbőczi’s intellectual traps; he does not deny himself, so that even in death he may remain worthy of the trust of his eighty thousand scythemen. Only through this extreme act can the protagonist remain faithful to himself; only thus can he spare his comrades a historical and moral fracture. Otherwise, he would have shattered the very faith that kept the revolution incandescent – the force that sustained its inner fire and later became both example and measure for subsequent generations.
As noted earlier, for Ferenc Kósa the turn to historical subject matter served, under the socialist dictatorship, to articulate again and again – with the least possible compromise – what was essential to the present: the possibilities of social action and of the moral fulfilment of the personality. In the post-1968 period, when the credibility of dominant left-wing ideologies was visibly shaken across Europe, filmmakers needed an aesthetic language capable of evoking the social misery of the contemporary moment – misery obscured by appearances and only partially representable in the forums of public life. After the mythologising treatment of material in Ten Thousand Days and Judgement, Gábor Gerencsér argues, Kósa increasingly turns towards an allegorical mode of speech. Allegory is the Aesopian language of dictatorship: it means more than what it depicts.
The film that marks this tonal shift is Nincs idő (No Time), which – using László B. Nagy’s formulation – speaks in the active voice rather than the passive grammar of suffering, and undertakes ruthless confrontation instead of sanctimonious prophecy. The story is set in a prison in the late 1920s. The enclosed space of the prison, with its strictly defined role structure, provides an exceptionally apt milieu for shaping a content that depicts the nature of a struggle between irreconcilable forces. It is a strange institution. Director Dániel Udvardi calls it a small island of humanism; quoting Plutarch, he introduces a reform pedagogy and treats the prison not as an end in itself but as an instrument of “socialisation”. There is a choir, a painting club, and even the possibility of amateur archaeology within the chief warder’s work detail. Three political prisoners, however, refuse to take part in the cultural circles orchestrated by Udvardi. Jáki, Törő and Gádor are communists; through a hunger strike they attempt to tear the mask off the regime and reveal its true nature. That their perseverance is meaningful – that the deaths of Jáki and Törő are not futile sacrifices – is convincingly demonstrated by the nationwide prison strike triggered by their action, and by the awakening of István Kallós, a prisoner serving a life sentence.
Kallós is the film’s most individualised hero. He was convicted because of his father’s false oath; despite his legal guilt he is a pure man of heightened moral sensitivity, protesting the lack of freedom, the lies and the moral inferno by a self-destructive act: he swallows a spoon. The precursor of this figure is the protagonist of the 1967 short feature Öngyilkosság (Suicide) – the child Attila József – who answers an experienced injustice with an attempt at self-destruction. Like Kallós, he is “blessed with a sensitivity to justice, and punished with a sensitivity to injustice.”
In a world that is dictatorial in its very essence, where oppressors and oppressed stand in sharp opposition, Udvardi’s attempt at creating unity is bound to fail; and in a moment of crisis – as Minister Fóthy states in the film – it is of little interest who is right. Udvardi is dismissed despite recognition of his merits, and Fóthy appoints Dezső Babella, the sadistic chief warder, to take command of the institution.
No Time is an elaborate, polyphonic work that, in the words of Alberto Moravia, "speaks against all tyranny, for all freedom, without exception".
Although most works by Ferenc Kósa and Sándor Sára are characterised by carefully conceived, original and innovative visual worlds, the formal concept of No Time ranks among the most memorable even within their oeuvre. The closed, predominantly iron-grey world of the prison is set in sharp contrast with the colourful outside world of memories and desires. Yet the colour sequences themselves are not uniform: unlike the idyllic fragments observed by Kallós or the alluring colours of the masked “procession of life”, the colours of the “inside” are heavy and repellent.
As in No Time, Blizzard (1974) also depicts a process of awakening, but here the emergence of the acting individual and the struggle toward a higher self is no longer a sufficient programme. The film is set in the Carpathians during the second half of World War II. Tense sequences of a military patrol competition unfold on screen: the soldiers’ bitter struggle is driven by the promise that the winner will receive home leave, while the others must return to the front. Márton Csorba (Marci) wins the competition at the cost of killing one of his comrades. “There is war, Mama – world war – even behind a single leaf,” Marci later explains to his grandmother. What interests the filmmakers is precisely how the existential law of “kill or be killed”, the pariah existence that accepts the law of the wolf, might be overcome – in other words, whether there is any way out of the inferno.
In Csorba’s moral development, Mama’s natural humanity represents the “pure source”, the ethical quality that leads him toward his better self. She knows the forest so intimately that she can “see even with her feet”. She understands the language of birds, knows the uses of wild savory, and what cures gout. When her grandson buries a loaf of bread, she guesses he has already killed a human being. Within the film’s system of meaning, nature is equated with the natural and the humane; whoever violates nature inevitably stands opposed to humanity. During their journey in search of Marci’s parents, they are captured by field gendarmes. The field gendarmerie, led by its commanding officer, represents a universe of chaos and moral disintegration, revealing the corruption of this state of existence through a repellent fusion of the grotesque and the tragic. The officer, played by well-known actor Péter Haumann, is no longer capable of fulfilling even his military role: one moment he mocks Csorba for having been caught lying, the next he launches into absurd reflections on the camp newspaper. Marci and his grandmother eventually escape, and his father is found – only to be mercilessly gunned down by one of the gendarmes. We then see the protagonist firing the machine gun he had earlier buried at the command building, which by then has already been abandoned. The front has moved on. As Ferenc Kiss observes: “With this reckoning, the boy finally breaks free from his state of pariah existence, yet he does not attain the freedom of meaningful struggle. That moment has passed. This is why he shoots at nothing – and at everything.”
Two Portraits of Mission
From the mid-1970s onward, with the emergence of the “Budapest School”, documentary film and documentary fiction gained renewed strength in Hungarian cinema. Ferenc Kósa contributed to the flourishing of documentary filmmaking with two works that provoked significant social response. Both Küldetés (Mission) and Az utolsó szó jogán (The Right to the Last Word) were completed in 1976, although the latter could only be shown to the public in 1987. Mission is a portrait film about András Balczó, the most successful modern pentathlete of all time. The film opens in the fairy-garden landscape of Balczó’s and Kósa’s shared childhood, on the banks of the Bujtos stream – a place of youthful vows, resolutions and longings for both of them. It was here that Balczó formulated the guiding imperative of his life: to wrest from the world, through years of effort, a just recognition of performance. Eleven months of the year, from morning until late at night, he runs, shoots, swims, fences and rides. And while he breaks record after record, on the final day of the 1969 World Championships in Budapest we see an entire community running with him. He himself can no longer tell whether he is winning through them, or they through him. At the peak of his success, he withdraws to a forest cabin with four books under his arm to take stock of his life. Reading György Moldova’s novel Negyven prédikátor (Forty Preachers), he recognises his own fate in Father Tinkovicz’s message: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” He breaks down in tears, yet makes a clear decision: he gives up competitive sport. Only now does Kósa’s real question arise: what awaits a man in 1970s Hungary who had been a world-class figure in the rarefied realm of measurable performance? Since the film’s protagonist is guided in civilian life by the same moral values he followed as an athlete, his attempts at integration are doomed to failure. His proposals are dismissed as idealistic, and when a national team captain is appointed, he is not even consulted. According to the director, in a world based on the exchange of lies – “if you believe my lie, I will believe yours” – people like András Balczó simply run out of paths.
In a society where institutions are marked by arbitrariness and chronic dysfunction, even the protection of human life becomes possible only through immense effort. This experience is reflected in the ordeal of biologist Dr József Béres. The Right to the Last Word recounts the calvary of the inventor of the now well-known Béres Drops, the dramatic struggle the biologist from Kisvárda was forced to wage against himself and both his immediate and broader environment. The 270-minute film is a rigorously documented sociographic work. Béres developed his drops while researching pathological changes in potatoes, initially testing them on himself. As news of his discovery spread, more and more desperate people turned to him for help. The film’s protagonist is faced with a brutal moral dilemma: if he gives the preparation to those pleading for it, he breaks the law and risks punishment; if he refuses, he betrays his conscience. Béres chooses to obey his conscience. The drops are used successfully in many cases where medicine based on surgery and cytostatic treatments had already given up. Béres has loyal supporters as well as determined adversaries. While the number of those seeking his help continues to grow, his superiors do everything in their power to obstruct his work. He is accused of charlatanism, his laboratory is shut down, and his professional allies are forced to resign.
Ten years later, in 1986, the filmmakers return to Béres and his patients. We hear almost fairy-tale-like accounts from people who consider themselves cured, yet the official registration of the preparation still has not taken place – despite the fact that Professor Masuda is already using the drops successfully in Japan.
Mission and The Right to the Last Word are sister films in the sense that, through the portrayal of their protagonists’ ordeals, they offer an X-ray-like diagnosis of a prodigal world that has lost its sense of proportion and is therefore condemned to decline. After the first screenings of The Right to the Last Word, the public rushed to shops in such numbers that the glass industry was eventually unable to keep up with demand – collapsing under the strain, much like so many other institutions in Hungary at the end of the 1980s.
Back to fiction
While József Béres was fighting in real life for a just assessment of achievement, in 1981 Ferenc Kósa returned to fiction with another feature film devoted to the ordeal of the truth-seeking individual. A mérkőzés (The Match) is a satire by genre. This form presents a world constructed from both realistic and fantastic elements through the lens of a judging gaze: it portrays figures striving to stand their ground in their full human dimension, while grotesquely distorting the demonic forces of history.
The story is set at a political turning point, in the summer of 1956, in a provincial county town. During a match of the local football team, the referee disallows a goal scored by the home side. After the game, the head of the local sports section – who also happens to be the deputy chief of the county police – smashes the referee’s head against a toilet bowl following a heated argument. Bálint Balla, the editor-in-chief of the local paper, intends to make the scandal public. However, Deputy Chief Rigó, whose superior is in Budapest attending an ideological briefing, blocks the publication of the article and has the journalist arrested. Balla refuses to submit. A scuffle breaks out, at the end of which a policeman is fatally injured. Cornered by the situation, Rigó proposes a deal: you clear my name, and I will clear yours. The editor-in-chief rejects this world built on the alliance of corruption and cynicism and chooses instead to fight for the truth. While his opponent represents tactics without ethics, he himself embodies ethics without tactics. The conflict is resolved by the police chief returning from Budapest, who draws a moral equivalence between the two attitudes and, invoking the claim that history has placed a low ceiling above our heads, simply orders peace. This gesture functions as a bitter and ironic authorial comment on what a truth-seeking individual can expect in a world structured around compromise.
Kósa’s next film, Guernica (1982), continues to pose historical questions, yet its narrative unfolds in the present tense. When most cows are turned into tanks rather than stew, the film asks, what can an artist do against war? The urgency of this question was underscored by the intensified arms race of the early 1980s. As one possible answer, we see sculptor Márton Varga carving a monumental warning sign – a sculpted scream – into a mountainside. Alongside this, another narrative strand unfolds, familiar from Kósa’s earlier films. We meet Margit, a brick factory worker who, as the lover of Viktor, a businessman with a background in the interior ministry, clearly feels alienated in a world of empty routines. One evening she sees a television report about the sculptor and visits him the next day in the mountains. His autonomous personality completely captivates her, and under his influence she travels to Madrid to see Picasso’s Guernica.
The encounter with the sculptor and the journey signal that Margit has set out toward a higher self, yet she ultimately proves unable to escape the inferno. Everyday life, built on compromise, overwhelms the ideal. Despite the profound impact of Picasso’s painting, she returns home and marries Viktor. Redemption is thus withheld. Although the young woman turns back toward the realm of habit and convention, the Margit seen in the bridal dance at the end of the film is no longer the same person we first encountered in the brick factory scenes.
Ferenc Kósa’s latest feature film to date, A másik ember (The Other Man), is a characteristic threshold work both by virtue of its production date (1987) and its message: it offers a comprehensive lesson from Hungary’s past to a society preparing for political transition. The two-part film is set first in 1944 and then in 1956. The first part takes stock of the fathers’ legacy; the second, that of the sons.
In 1944, the father, ensign Antal Bojtár, survives the Eastern Front with a single comrade, József Torda. They make it home, only to be sentenced to death for desertion by a senile colonel serving as a military judge. Meanwhile, the Arrow Cross are openly preparing to seize power. An Arrow Cross leader named Réti, impressed by Bojtár’s integrity, rescues the two men from execution. Bojtár, however, refuses the bargain offered. In an unguarded moment he steps onto a plank; at the far end stands Réti, who plunges into the ravine. Bojtár escapes and vows never again to take up a weapon.
From the slaughter of war he draws a personal conclusion: against the “truth” of weapons there exists a human point of view, and whoever takes up arms cannot be in the right. Yet home offers no protection. Réti sends the vulnerable Torda – whose life the ensign once saved at the front – to the Bojtár farmstead to find out where his friend is hiding. In the meantime, the gendarmes have taken away Bojtár’s father-in-law, Márton Fejszés, and our hero decides to seek refuge in the nearby forest. But even the forest is no longer safe: what was once a shelter for outlaws and irregular bands has become Réti’s domain. The trap works. First Torda, who tries in terror to warn Bojtár, is shot down; then the ensign, too, is struck by bullets.
Back home, the Fejszés farm becomes a place of mourning and loss. Bojtár’s death breaks everyone –each in a different way. What remains of him as a legacy is the human point of view: at once example and commandment.
The film shifts time and space. At the beginning of the second part, the events of the 1956 revolution are already in full swing. Antal Bojtár Jr., now grown up, continues his father’s legacy and refuses to take up arms. This brings him into sharp conflict both with Zsuzsi, the woman he loves, and with his fellow students. He stays away from the fighting, condemning himself to the role of witness – and therefore he can only lose. He must first endure Zsuzsi’s death, then the killing of his student companions.
Kósa takes literally the line he puts into Bojtár’s mouth: “When the weapons go blind, our history goes blind as well.” In the film’s worldview, the blinding of national history produces an existence below life, just as war does. The revolution’s gestures of violence are marked by impersonality and randomness: Zsuzsi, Pista Krausz and the others, and finally Antal Bojtár himself are all killed by forces that are impersonal and insidious. Each fulfils his or her own “law of life”. Krausz and the other students die because they accept the logic of weapons; Antal dies because he rejects that logic.
In keeping with the logic of grand epic, The Other Man evokes the revolution through a multi-stranded narrative: the linear main plot is complemented by a series of subplots. One such strand is the visit of Grandfather Fejszés, who – obeying his daughter’s wishes – sets off for Budapest by cart to bring food and blood to the revolutionaries and to take the boy home. At first, he is only a quiet observer, but after Bojtár’s death the tragic dilemmas of the survivor fall to him. He fears that if he tells the truth at home, his daughter will not survive it; if he forces himself to remain silent, he must live with a lie. In the end he chooses the latter and continues to live with a divided soul.
Afterword
In 1990 Ferenc Kósa was elected as an MP to the National Assembly. During his parliamentary career he undertook numerous public policy responsibilities. He played an active role in the drafting of Act I of 1996 (the Media Act), and later in the creation of the Film Act; until it was dissolved, he also served as chairman of the Hungarian Historical Film Public Foundation. In this period his directing activity narrowed to a few television documentaries, while as a photographer he mounted numerous solo and group exhibitions.
[2013]