If we outline Tamás Almási’s career as a filmmaker in dates, the sources of his world of experience and the trajectory of the social changes that shaped his way of thinking emerge clearly. He was born in 1948, the very year of the left-wing political turn, when the construction of socialism began in Hungary. The 1956 Revolution was presumably still not a consciously lived experience for him, but rather a childhood memory, moreover one experienced in the provincial city of Székesfehérvár. His adolescence may have been fired by the promises of the reforms that followed the suppression of the Revolution, only to be followed by the disillusionment after 1968, just as he was reaching adulthood. Almási thus became a filmmaker halfway through this forty-year era, during the prolonged period of stagnation: from 1970 he worked as an assistant director at the film studio, studied at the Academy of Theatre and Film Arts between 1975 and 1979, and in 1980, at the age of thirty-two, directed his first feature film, Ballagás (Graduation), after which he continued his career as a documentary filmmaker. By then, we are already in the 1980s, amid the process of decay and eventual collapse of the existing political system.
As an independent filmmaker, he first became a chronicler of this period. It was an era characterized first by the final days of the regime and then by change and the uncertainties of a new situation. There would indeed be winners – the democracy that replaced the dictatorship and the private capital that supplanted state ownership represented unequivocally positive changes – yet the proclaimed “masters” of the previous system (at least according to its recurring phrases like “the dictatorship of the proletariat”, “workers’ and peasants’ power”), as proof of the regime’s utopia, or, more bluntly, its lie, would mostly emerge as the losers of the transformation. And Almási, as he explained when discussing his outlook in a 1998 interview with Zsófia Mihancsik, seeks to “approach things from the perspective of the losers, the weaker ones.”
It can hardly be coincidental that his (one-word) titles repeatedly employ privative constructions (Ítéletlenül [Women condemned], 1991; Tehetetlenül [Helpless], 1998), as well as concepts suggesting adverse circumstances (Szorításban [In a vise], 1988; Lassítás [Slowdown], 1989; Meddő [Barren], 1995; Kudarcok [Failures], 1996). In Kitüntetetten [Decorated], which presents the memories of a women’s socialist work brigade through the prism of the period following the change of political system, the title – positive in itself – is instead ironic, or at least ambiguous, even as the film sympathises with its interviewees, who experienced the “good old socialist days” with genuine faith and enthusiasm. Even as a chronicler of social processes, it is the human being who interests him: the perseverance of the losers and their determination to act – despite every obstacle, in the grip of helplessness. Following the change of political system, from the second half of the 1990s onwards, while retaining his interest in society, he increasingly turned his attention to human relationships, and his films simultaneously record personal dramas and raise universal, timeless questions. After the documentaries exploring the private sphere, his most recent works examine human achievement in the context of history and the economic sphere, focusing on the efforts, and not infrequently the dramas, that lie behind success.
Almási’s oeuvre can be understood at the intersection of his images of society and the individual, and in the relationship between the two. It thus bears witness both to the greatest process of the second half of the twentieth century, known as the change of political system, and to the challenges faced in individual lives. A historical trajectory can be traced through all this: in his essay A szívről és az objektívról [On the Heart and the Lens], published in Magyar filmrendezőportrék [Portraits of Hungarian Film Directors], edited by Vince Zalán and surveying Almási’s oeuvre up to the mid-2000s, Lóránt Stőhr distinguishes three periods: 1981–1987 – between state socialism and democracy; 1987–1996 – the change of political system; 1996–2004 – private life and existential questions. (Drawing on his earlier study, Stőhr continues his survey of Almási’s career in the chapter devoted to him in his 2019 volume Személyesség, jelenlét, narrativitás [Personality, Presence, Narrativity].) The period from 2005 to the present can, in thematic terms, be regarded as a kind of synthesis, since individual destinies are given a voice alongside the recent historical past and the contemporary economic world; 2008 also saw the completion of his second feature film, Márió, a varázsló (Mario the Magician). The films that reflect these thematic and – as we shall shortly see – methodological changes nevertheless share a common denominator, one whose different aspects often reinforce one another: struggle – even if that struggle sometimes ends in failure.
Another inseparable aspect of the oeuvre can be described through the development of Almási’s cinematic mode of expression. First, there is the apparently distant and unbalanced occurrences of feature films on the one hand and documentaries on the other (to date, only two feature-length fiction films stand against some thirty documentaries, likewise predominantly feature-length, not to mention the television productions numbering in the hundreds); second, there is the changing methodology of his documentaries, which moves from the more traditional forms of interview-based, situational and observational documentary through distinctive applications of fiction-film techniques to productions that represent a synthesis in this respect as well. The process can also be described in terms of changes in the institutional background: from the shorter works incorporated into the television programming of the 1980s (magazines and series) – including, among others, two pairs of films, Sok húron pendülnek (They Are Playing on Many Strings, 1982) and Kölyköd voltam (I Was Your Kid, 1983), as well as Budapest Double (Budapesti kettős, 1985) and TEHO-napló (TEHO Diary, 1986) –through feature-length auteur documentaries produced first within the studio system and later independently outside it, most often also distributed theatrically (the eight films of the Ózd series, from 1987 to 1998; meanwhile Without Judgment, Szívügyem (A Matter of the Heart, 1996), and, among other films, Szerelem első hallásra (More than Love), 1999) and Sejtjeink (Our Cells, 2002), to projects made largely on commission and thus more “genre-oriented” in character, or, by analogy with fiction films, ventures that might be described as midcult (Puskás Hungary, 2009; Tititá, 2015; Folyékony arany (Liquid Gold, 2019). His most recent film, Onódy, a hatvanas évek császára (Onódy, Emperor of the Sixties, 2023), may open a new period – or signal a return to auteur documentaries that explore the past through individual destinies.
In this career overview, I will first situate Tamás Almási’s work within the broader context of Hungarian film history based on his directorial methodology, and then present the most important films of each period, likewise placing them in a broader context, but this time within the oeuvre itself.
Feature Film and/or Documentary Film
In the history of Hungarian cinema after 1948, it is not unusual for individual filmmakers to direct both feature films and documentaries, with the two forms occupying a similarly significant place in their oeuvres, even if not in equal proportions. Such directors include Sándor Sára, Judit Elek, Gyula Gazdag, and the creative partnerships of István Dárday and Györgyi Szalai, and Lívia Gyarmathy and Géza Böszörményi. In the 1970s, the movement known as the Budapest School emerged, characterized by the fusion of documentary and fiction-film methods. Some directors arrived at this approach from documentary filmmaking and later returned to a more traditional documentary form, as did Judit Ember and Pál Schiffer; others began here and eventually developed toward highly stylized fiction, including the Dárday–Szalai partnership, which laid the foundations of the movement, and Béla Tarr, whose career began with docudramas. In Almási’s case, feature films are subordinate to documentaries both in proportion and in significance (in this respect, his career can be compared to that of Gyula Gulyás, who likewise made only one or two feature films, and the creative partnership of János Erdélyi and Dezső Zsigmond), and the procedure of combining fiction with documentary is likewise not characteristic of his art. Instead, he develops a distinctive method of his own in this field – and this becomes the defining feature of his style. Outlining the film-historical context is therefore useful in his case, on the one hand for showing which models he rejects, and on the other for demonstrating the method of which he becomes a pioneer in Hungary.
Almási gained his first experience in filmmaking as an assistant, specifically as a member of feature-film crews, working alongside directors of no small stature. He assisted Zoltán Fábri on three films and Miklós Jancsó on two, and worked on one film each by Márta Mészáros, Pál Zolnay, Imre Gyöngyössy, István Szabó, Rezső Szörény, Imre Fehér and Miklós Szinetár. While still a student, he became co-director with Géza Radványi of the latter’s final film shot in Hungary, his cinematic “swan song,” Circus Maximus (1979). In several interviews, Almási has spoken of these assignments and the experiences he gained from them as formative ones; that is, he does not regard this line of work as an involuntary detour on his way toward independent directing. At film school, too, he studied in the feature-film directing and cinematography class taught by Zoltán Fábri and György Illés (“I had always wanted to be a feature-film director […] I didn’t even know what a documentary was,” he told Klára Muhi in a 2007 interview). After graduating, he was able to make his first feature film, and subsequently he had numerous projects in development – working with writers such as Péter Dobai, Miklós Munkácsi, Anna Jókai, Sándor Tar, János Háy, Péter Fábri, and Péter Horváth, who played the character of the dropout teacher in Graduation – but these projects failed to materialize during the 1980s for various reasons, primarily arising from his position within the studio system. (Even in one of his most recent interviews, in 2024, he recalls his old plan to make a fictional adaptation of the story of Pista Pipás.) He therefore joined the Youth Editorial Office of Hungarian Television, initially indeed out of necessity, and later the Budapest Regional Editorial Office, where he made documentary programmes. Like his work as an assistant, these assignments offered him an opportunity—this time to practise documentary filmmaking—and led to increasingly distinctive and independent projects, establishing him primarily as a documentary filmmaker, while he never abandoned his ambitions as a feature-film director.
Almási thus began with a feature film and plans for further fiction films, before circumstances led him to become a documentary filmmaker. From the outside, the process may indeed appear that simple – or rather, that complicated and surprising – but if we look more closely at the beginning of his career, it may not seem far-fetched to identify features that already point towards a documentary approach.
It is worth considering two of his film-school examination films side by side; both also served as cinematographer Nyika Jancsó’s examination films. The first, Vizit (The Visit, 1975), is about children with intellectual disabilities. As a reportage documentary, its harrowing subject encapsulates, as it were, Almási’s later oeuvre, since it deals on the one hand with the healthcare system and, on the other, with deeply moving human lives. This is also reflected in the style of the twelve-minute short: alongside the interviews, we are given sensitive close-ups of those concerned. The statistics themselves are shocking, but the faces transcend sociological fact and, even in their multitude, lend the experience of the “visit” a personal and dramatic intensity. The other examination film they made together, however, is a work of fiction: a 1976 adaptation, under the same title, of István Örkény’s short story Meddig él egy fa? (How Long Does a Tree Live?). The encounter between a terminally ill elderly woman and a young woman expecting a child raises the fundamental questions that would later recur in Almási’s “personal” documentaries. The short film, which won the SILECT Grand Prix – then the equivalent of a Student Academy Award – and features two outstanding performances by Hédi Temessy and Éva Szabó, also has a “documentary” sequel of sorts, although only by virtue of an external circumstance: as Nyika Jancsó recalled in a 2020 interview, the film was shot in Ózd… Almási’s film-school works thus opened his career towards both documentary and fiction filmmaking; indeed, his graduation film would ultimately be a documentary as well: Hasta mañana (1978–79), about the 1978 World Festival of Youth and Students (VIT) in Cuba, approached the event in a distinctly unconventional manner, not concealing its less flattering and grotesque aspects either.
Almási’s first feature film, Graduation, can, on the one hand, be regarded as a generational coming-of-age film, in keeping with the theme of young people embarking on their careers that had been present since the 1960s. On the other hand, it is an unusual variation on that form, since the director, by then already in his thirties, does not portray the teenagers of his own generation but instead offers a powerful image of society in the 1980s through the much favoured and frequently used microcosm of the school (the film, as he told András Gervai in 2002, “drew on my own experiences, on what I had lived through, and on my disillusionment at the time”).
His own generational experience can perhaps be discerned in the fact that the story is essentially about the extinction of the spirit of reform, albeit in a society already inching towards a consumer culture (see the “affair” of the graduation outfits). In terms of its disillusionment, Graduation forms a companion piece to Péter Gothár’s legendary Megáll az idő (Time Stands Still, 1981), made only a year later. The similarities between their motifs are more than striking, ranging from disorderly behaviour at school and the teacher characters (the ineffectual headmaster, the dictatorial deputy head and the liberal form teacher) to the sobering romantic conflict. What began in the 1960s – namely, time standing still – reaches its endpoint in the 1980s, following the disillusionment of 1968 (see the ending of Gothár’s film).
Graduation is thus a work reflecting on the final decade of the state-socialist era and, as such, foreshadows the documentaries that followed in both its themes and its repertoire of motifs. Yet Almási’s documentary outlook is already evident in the fact that he systematically fulfils the obligatory promise “we’ll meet again” displayed on the class photograph at the end of the film. To date, he has made three reportage documentaries about the film’s cast, who were selected from eleven thousand secondary-school students: Ballagás után öt évvel (Five Years After Graduation, 1986), Találkozó (Reunion, 1994) and Harmadik találkozás (Third Encounter, 2005). Though on a smaller scale, this develops into a project comparable to the Ózd series: the evolving personal lives of the participants represent the change of political system and the subsequent process of “emergence”, while in the case of several individuals, the unexpected twists and turns of their personal lives come increasingly to the fore. The intersection of the social and the individual is thus fully realised in this documentary project that grew out of Almási’s first feature film.
Graduation is linked to the later documentaries in another way as well. The film uses music by Edda Művek, whose power is particularly evident in the frequent “running” sequences characteristic of films of this genre. Almási’s first documentaries to display the hallmarks of an auteur, They Play on Many Strings and I Was Your Kid, capture the contradictions of a creaking, crumbling socialist system through pop musicians’ struggle to establish a trade union and the break-up of the band Edda, respectively. Both films foreground the anomalies of a capitalist mindset forced into a socialist framework, and both employ interviews and situational documentary methods. In They Play on Many Strings, the emphasis falls on the latter: at the inaugural meeting of the musicians’ trade union, contributions by political leaders – a deputy minister, a Party functionary and the director of a record company – make clear the limits of their “liberal” ideas and expose a paternalistic exercise of power whose message is “this far, and no further”. In the Edda film, alongside the juxtaposition of statements by band members embroiled in disputes with one another, another “situation” is given particular emphasis: the farewell concert, with its frenzied young audience. The images of “rebellion” are at once moving and disillusioning, while the picture of society is deepened by the individual lives revealed in the desperate letters addressed to the band.
If we consider Almási’s most recent feature film to date, the connection with his documentary work is equally striking, since Mario the Magician tells the story of an Italian company arriving in an impoverished settlement after the change of political system and, through it, portrays the losers of the transformation. It is this same process that receives its most complex treatment – in terms of both film history and social history – in the Ózd series.
Here is the polished English version, keeping the Hungarian film titles first and the English titles in brackets.
The Ózd Saga
Filming in Ózd began in the spring of 1987 and, with shorter interruptions, continued for eleven years, resulting in eight standalone films (one of them, the 1993 Miénk a gyár (The Factory Is Ours), is in two parts); the final work, Helpless, serves as a summation of the series: In a vise, Slowdown, Az első kétszáz év (The First Two Hundred Years) (1989–92), Miénk a gyár (The Factory Is Ours), Acélkapocs (Steel Bond) (1994), Petrenkó (Petrenkó) (1995), Meddő (Barren), and Helpless. This landmark undertaking has by now unquestionably entered the canon. “If the history of the years before and after the change of political system had to be written, it could be done on the basis of Almási’s film. It contains virtually every detail of the process that came to be called privatisation, which there affected the lives of several thousand people and their families,” Vince Zalán stated in a 2013 discussion on the documentary canon. His colleague Márta Elbert, who as a founder of Fekete Doboz (Black Box) herself did much to document the change of political system – and whose group’s footage Almási also used in Széthullás időrendben (Disintegration in Chronological Order), the two-part episode he compiled entirely from archival footage for the 1997 television series Rendszerváltó évek (Years of Political Change), as well as in the episodes he made for the television series Hónapról hónapra (Month by Month), which chronicled the events of 1989 – assessed Almási’s undertaking as follows in a 1998 interview: “I regard Tamás Almási’s Ózd series as the greatest documentary work of recent years. If anything is about the change of political system, this is about it with crystal clarity. It is undeniable evidence.” “There is only one undertaking comparable to Almási’s in Hungarian documentary filmmaking,” György Simó stated in 1998, “Pál Schiffer’s Videoton saga, which he has been filming since 1991.” (Curiously, it was not Almási but his older colleague who made a similarly landmark documentary series about Almási’s native city and its factory.) In her review of Mario the Magician, Klára Muhi calls the work, filmed “obsessively” and “probably the most important foundational film on the change of political system”, an “Ózd documentary saga”, analogous to the Videoton series.
The monumental series, which alternately brings the processes themselves and individual participants in them to the fore, would merit a separate analysis. Besides the sweeping scope of its story, it is also methodologically complex, incorporating both interviews and situational documentary; at the same time, the series as a whole is an emblematic example of the longitudinal observational method that also appears in Almási’s earlier work (the “reunions” associated with Graduation) and his later films (A Matter of the Heart, Our Cells). Moreover, Barren, the “exclamation mark” placed at the end of the series (Erzsébet Bori), also stands out for its visual language. Reportage, situational and longitudinal observational documentary methods essentially call for functional, descriptive images. In Barren, however, the lives of the outcasts who live among – and off – the ruins of the destroyed factory, digging scrap iron from beneath the rubble with their bare hands, become an apocalyptic image transcending their immediate reality – without the film’s authenticity being called into question for so much as a single shot. “Barren is a film of hopelessness, lack of prospects and emptiness, but this emerges not only from the individual images but from the structure as a whole,” Lóránt Stőhr writes in his study. In this respect, the episode is akin to the Krasznahorkai–Tarr films being made in parallel with the Ózd series, which stylise the destruction and decay accompanying the change of political system into a cosmic vision; it is, as it were, their documentary counterpart. This also explains why Gergely Bikácsy, contributing to the debate surrounding documentary film in a 1996 article, could write: “Meddő, then, is not ‘pure’ investigative documentary: its director considers the emotional impact of fiction film even more important than uncovering the facts.” It is perhaps no coincidence that in one interview Almási names Meddő as his favourite documentary.
Alongside the Ózd series, several standalone documentaries set out to portray the social processes of the change of political system and the consequences they left on individual lives. The repercussions of the ferment that began in the 1980s are explored – alongside They Play on Many Strings and I Was Your Kid, two films that also continue the tradition of the beat films of the late 1960s – in Budapesti kettős (Budapest Duet) and TEHO-napló (TEHO Diary), both in reportage-documentary form. The former portrays the first election of the socialist era to feature multiple candidates and thus to appear democratic (two years later, in 1987, András Kovács treated the same subject in the fiction film Valahol Magyarországon (Somewhere in Hungary)); the latter examines the impact of introducing the local development contribution. From Home to Home (2004), about the lives of Hungarian communities beyond Hungary’s borders – in Transylvania, Transcarpathia and Vojvodina – and their illegal resettlement in Hungary, looks back on the years preceding the change of political system. The contemporary story of Az út vége (The End of the Road) (2003), made a year earlier, explores an issue also addressed in the Ózd series through the circumstances of two families: one that migrates in search of a better livelihood, and another that hopes for a positive turn in its own homeland. Yet the Ózd series itself also continues, for there, too, life “wants to live and insists on its rights” (György Báron): A mi kis Európánk (Our Own Little Europe) (2006) takes stock of local people’s views and opportunities in the light of Hungary’s accession to the European Union.
Confrontation
As we have seen, Almási’s early documentaries already combine the more traditional methods of reportage with situational documentary filmmaking: some of the most memorable moments in his work from this period are associated with scenes of this kind. Later, the interviews develop into large-scale longitudinal documentaries; the situational method does not disappear from these works (the Ózd series, too, contains such scenes, some of them particularly revealing), but it recedes somewhat into the background. Subsequently, Almási makes situational documentaries that combine this approach with the longitudinal method, as well as films built around a single, one-off situation. The strongest among them are those in which – and this already points towards the fiction-film style of his documentaries – the director is not merely present at an event that occurs independently of him, but creates the situation himself. It is indicative of the nature of this approach – or, put differently, of the delicate boundary of intervention – that he films present-day events only when they arise independently of him; artificially created situations are used to explore the past.
Two such films from the mid-1980s are Ketten a Süveg utcából (Two from Süveg Street, 1986) and Töredékek (Fragments, 1986): in the first, past and present are brought into confrontation through the story of people living in the same flat, while in the second, a small advertisement placed in the past “reaches” into the present day. The most dramatic manifestation of this method is Women condemned. With this film, made immediately after the change of political system, Almási joins the tradition of historical documentaries devoted to uncovering the past; its closest predecessors are the Gulyás brothers’ Törvénysértés nélkül (Without Breaking the Law, 1987) and the Gyarmathy–Böszörményi filmmaking partnership’s feature-length documentary Recsk 1950–1953 – Egy titkos kényszermunkatábor története (Recsk 1950–1953 – The Story of a Secret Forced-Labour Camp, 1988), both made before the change of political system. The difference of a few years between the making of these films is significant: the earlier works of the 1980s still concentrate on uncovering the past itself (although both already contain situations involving confrontation, at least in a virtual sense). Rather than uncovering a reality that was by then largely known, Almási is interested in the consequences of the past as it was lived, and particularly in its impact on the formation of personality. He therefore stages a “class reunion” in their former cell for women who had been imprisoned for political reasons in Kistarcsa during the 1950s (more precisely, because their husbands were politicians), and then, creating a further situation, brings in the inhumane prison guard who had once been responsible for them. On the level of individual personalities, the encounter is dramatic – what reaction does this unexpected turn provoke in each of them? – while at the same time it brings to the fore the social questions raised by the change of political system: can the crimes of the past be forgotten; can forgiveness be expected; how does the tendency to whitewash the guilty persist; is restitution possible, and if so, how; and, most importantly, can everything that happened to us be survived and endured without lasting psychological damage – not necessarily as convicted prisoners, but “without judgement”?
In the case of constructed situations – including in this film – there is an important professional and moral dilemma, one that Almási himself is conscious of, observes almost as an artistic credo and, in my view, respects: “Where the boundary of creativity lies is a very delicate issue,” he explains in a 2019 interview with Benedek Várkonyi. “And this is where psychology comes in: I have never filmed anything that would not have happened to the protagonist without me.”
Affairs of the Heart
The gap seemingly opens widest when documentary film turns to the subject of private life, not to substantiate social issues, but remaining at the level of the individual – and, when it does reach beyond the individual, confronting us directly with ultimate questions. In Lóránt Stőhr’s periodisation, the designation of the third phase, for all its simplicity, suggests an immense horizon: private life, existential questions. This horizon is indeed present in A Matter of the Heart, More than Hearing and Our Cells. And Almási’s distinctive style, which brings documentary into contact with fiction, undoubtedly plays a major role in all this.
This is not a fusion in the spirit of the Budapest School. Almási does not blend the two approaches; in his documentaries he remains within the form itself and the variants of it that he practises: reportage, situational documentary and longitudinal observation. In other words, he does not have non-professional performers act out roles close to their own circumstances (as Dárday and Szalai, and Béla Tarr, do in their early works), nor does he organise the real-life events of his protagonists into a story (as Pál Schiffer does in Cséplő Gyuri (Gyuri Cséplő) or Judit Ember in Fagyöngyök (Mistletoes); both films date from 1978). His method is different: essentially, it applies the methods of fiction filmmaking to documentary material. This raises not only aesthetic but also moral questions. In the interview quoted above, he says: “I have always tried to look for a story as though I were inventing one, but life does not provide us with ready-made stories like that. It is also an ethical question: how can we handle a story without falsifying it in the process?” Yet he describes the method itself with unaffected simplicity: “I make documentaries as though I were making fiction films. Audiences want stories, so I think in terms of stories containing characters, positive and negative protagonists who come into conflict over particular issues, just as they do within the structure of a fiction film. Catharsis is created; as a result, the viewer becomes emotionally involved and, of course, also grasps intellectually what has happened.” This was Almási’s contribution to the debate on documentary filmmaking during a 1996 round-table discussion chaired by György Simó and published in Filmvilág. With similar matter-of-factness, in his lengthy interview with Gervai he refers to this audience expectation, arguing that “a documentary should have a story that can be followed and characters with different personalities, people with whom one can identify or, conversely, disagree.” Or, in a telling remark from the Sipos interview cited earlier, on the relationship between documentary and fiction film: “Not to mention storytelling, dramaturgy and music. The boundaries between genres have become very blurred.” Finally, the simplest possible formulation of all this comes in an interview published in the weekly Élet és Irodalom (Life and Literature): “(…) I try to treat documentaries as fiction films as well.” Speaking to Amaryllis Tamás in 2000 about the particular form he practises, he said that “the terms ‘creative’ or ‘dramatic’ documentary [are commonly] used for it – I would like to practise the latter.” Compared with the widespread but uninformative term “creative”, “dramatic” is a far more precise description of the form of documentary represented by Almási, since it refers both to the dramaturgical construction of the story and to the use of devices that heighten emotional impact. In other words, these are techniques that fiction film employs as a matter of course but that documentary film might appear – or, according to one existing and rather rigid position, is held – to exclude. Almási demonstrates in practice both the viability and the legitimacy of this method.
Does this mean that Tamás Almási, who originally set out to become a fiction filmmaker, remained a fiction filmmaker even in his documentaries? It is an academic question, one answered by the films themselves – above all by the three works listed above, but in fact also by the later (portrait) films, such as Tititá and Liquid Gold. These films do, after all, contain consciously selected dramatic situations at critical junctures and acute conflicts. What could be more momentous than the conflict between life and death (A Matter of the Heart), birth (Our Cells), or literally self-sacrificing love (More Than Hearing) – especially when the outcome remains open: whether a suitable donor will be found for a heart transplant and, if so, whether the operation will succeed; or whether the prospective mother will be able to carry to term an embryo implanted through artificial insemination? Equally dramatic and uncertain is the fate of the Roma boy admitted to Ferenc Snétberger’s programme for nurturing musical talent but who finds it difficult to cope with this kind of pressure, as is that of the footballing genius who finds himself far from his homeland. One succeeds, the other does not – in Tititá, we follow the challenge as it unfolds, while in Puskás Hungary the filmmaker seeks an explanation for an almost incomprehensible career. And once again we arrive at the common denominator: whether the story is one of failure or success, the principal “message” of these dramatically structured works, supported by accomplished cinematography and film music, is struggle – a struggle that can invest even failure with greatness, humanity and cathartic power. But when the exemplary force of a story of failure would harm its subject or the cause embodied by its theme, then – as in the case of Kudarcok (Failures) or Alagsor (Down and out) – the filmmaker withholds the work for a time rather than releasing it to the public. For ultimately, it is the human being who matters most – particularly in documentary film, and especially in the work of Tamás Almási.
Method as Teaching
It is difficult to write about Almási’s documentary method in conceptual terms, especially since one of its elements – indeed, the most essential one – defies definition in such terms: the filmmaker’s empathy. It is there in the way Almási persuades the people who live through and reveal their personal lives and dramas before the camera – his characters (?), participants (?), subjects (?) – to take part in the filming, earns their trust, and dares to ask questions even in the most sensitive situations. Situations which, by the very nature of documentary filmmaking, arise only once and in which a decision must be made in a fraction of a second. If the question is wrong, if it elicits no answer or contributes nothing to the film, it can be cut. But what if the question is never asked and the footage therefore never comes into existence…?
Tamás Almási himself may not know much about this method, but he senses it and practises it, accumulating immeasurable experience in the process – and he passes that experience on. I believe he, too, would agree that teaching constitutes a segment of his oeuvre equal in importance to the films themselves – teaching that, of course, he could not practise at all, or at least not in this way, without the body of work behind him.
As part of the international documentary-directing programme supported by the European Community (DocNomads), the DokMa programme was launched at the University of Theatre and Film Arts in 2012. A number of Hungarian filmmakers have graduated from it who, in recent years, have revitalised the tradition of documentary filmmaking in Hungary, modernised the documentary form, and have already created a series of works capable of competing internationally. Almási’s earlier (fiction-film) classes included, among others, Linda Dombrovszky, Nóra Lakos, Szonja Szabó and Noémi Szakonyi, while his students in DokMa and DocNomads included Alexa Bakony, Asia Dér, Sára Haragonics, Máté Kőrösi, Zsófi Paczolay, Botond Püspök, Bernadett Tuza-Ritter, Réka Ugron and Dorottya Zurbó. Could there be more convincing evidence of the success of a filmmaker’s pedagogical and creative intentions than seeing them live on in the films of his students?
This, too, is a kind of longitudinal method.
[2026]