Free Fall

Szabadesés

dir. György Pálfi / South Korea, Hungary, France 2014 / 80’

subtitles: Polish and English

Panorama

20,000 Days on Earth, Amour fou, Ana Arabia, Asta Upset, Beautiful Youth, Blue Ruin, Boyhood, Charlie’s Country, Clouds of Sils Maria, Deep Love, Dracula 3D, Enemy, Force majeure, Free Fall, Goodbye to Language, Hard to Be a God, I’m Not Him, Journey to the West, Joy of Man’s Desiring, Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq, Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, L for Leisure, Leviathan, Manakamana, Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy, Mercuriales, Misunderstood, Moebius, My Seven Places, Oilfields Mines Hurricanes, Peter Gabriel: Back to Front, Pierrot Lunaire, Refugiado, Serious Ladies, Still the Water, Story of My Death, Super Duper Alice Cooper, That Lovely Girl, The Dance of Reality, The Double, The French Minister, The Great Night, The Last of the Unjust, The Missing Picture, The Police Officer’s Wife, The Sound of Spying, The Wind Rises, The Wonders, To Kill a Man, Tracks, Violet, We Are the Best!, Wild Tales, Winter Sleep

Section index

György Pálfi, one of the most interesting Hungarian filmmakers and director of such films as Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen, Taxidermia, Hukkle, and I Am Not Your Friend enjoyed some success at the International Film Festival in Karlovy Vary that came to an end yesterday. His film Free Fall garnered the award for best director, the special jury award, and the Europa Cinemas Label Award. Congratulations! Free Fall will be part of the program in the Panorama section at the 14th T-Mobile New Horizons International Film Festival.

"Seven types of chakras, seven floors, seven stories, each representing one of the chakras. The seven floors should be understood as the seven stages of human life from birth to death. And in the end, we tear down the entire construction – this is how Pálfi describes his work. The film, which is a Hungarian, French, and South Korean co-production, begins with a scene where an old woman jumps off the roof of her apartment building. Then it tells the stories of the residents living on each subsequent floor of the building.” (Gazeta Wyborcza)

"It was not Georgian George Ovashvili who was the star at the Festival in Karlovy Vary that came to an end on Saturday evening but rather Hungarian György Pálfi, maker of the radical, avant-garde experimental film Free Fall (a Hungarian, French, and South Korean co-production), which garnered the special jury award and the award for best director. Even for very savvy audiences who would accept the extravagance of Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, for example, Pálfi’s film will be a complete surprise and a feast for the eyes (it will be screened at New Horizons in Wrocław near the end of July). This wild, surreal manifesto turns the rules and concepts of the rational world on their head in a way that has not been seen in cinema since The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Buñuel made fun of bourgeois tastes, ridiculed the hypocrisy of the middle class, its shallow religiosity, consumerism, and dual morality.

This time, the Hungarian anarchist known for his black humor, the maker of the acclaimed and multi-award-winning Taxidermia, who has an obsessive interest in the human body and in horror, strikes right at the very core of absurd contemporary ideas about sex, family, entertainment, salvation, death, and other equally challenging issues. He parodies the habits, thought patterns, customary rituals, everything that, generally speaking, the civilized world has been trying to recognize as the standard, the norm, and an existential necessity. On screen, we see things happening that are unprecedented, unpredictable, and, as is usually the case with this director, shocking. (Janusz Wróblewski, Polityka)

Free Fall at the 14th T-Mobile New Horizons IFF

György Pálfi will be our guest in Gazeta Cafe - July 29, Tuesday, 6.00 p.m.