WHAT WAS ALL THAT ABOUT?

If you mention the Pécs Film Festival and if you talk to somebody who has taken part in any of them as participant, organizer or audience, suddenly eyes get hazy and the stories, impressions, memories flow unstoppably. Everybody remembers different things in different ways, but it becomes clear, that what happened there every year for a couple of days, left a very strong, unerasable impression in all of them. Why so? That's what this film attempts to determine.

The consonance of many independent elements created this special notion that we call: the legendary Film Festivals of Pécs.

What were these? The atmosphere of a city, the openness of the officials there - their level of professionalism? Or rather an era, the golden era of Hungarian film? Or is this such a strong memory because the film community could come together, because the city was the place for conversation, drinking and laughing together that couldn't take place anywhere else and any other time? Or that just nobody has got so intimate, tangible with the audience ever since? But we can approach it differently as well. As one of the interviewees - an important film director of the time - put it: Pécs in those years was the capital of democracy in Hungary. Where at the public debates the film community clashed with the official authority and an entire city could witness how often the filmmakers came out winners in these battles. Because the films of this era were not only good, but - as one critic phrased it: until the end of the eighties Hungarian cinema meant freedom in Europe. Was this perhaps the most important reason? Probably all these together are. And we watch with envy the revealing, elated faces as they reminisce, the faces of Miklós Jancsó, István Szabó, András Kovács, Károly Makk, Sándor Sára, Ferenc Kósa, Márta Mészáros, Péter Bacsó, or Pál Sándor, the people who are the reason this era will be remembered even many years from now...