Overview: Venom - A Diva in Exile is based on the short story by writer Zsófia Bán, on the troubling story of Hungarian singer and film star Katalin Karády. She was accused of spying during the war, imprisoned, tortured and banned on radio and in theatres in her home country. After her release, she worked hard to save numerous Jewish families, while the disappearance of the man she was linked to, first arrested by the Nazis and then by the Soviets, threw her into despair. Heartbroken, marginalized and banished in the new communist regime, she went into exile in 1951, spending fifteen years in Sao Paulo, Brazil, never to act in a film or on stage again. Then he lived in New York until his death (1990).
Overview: Main character of AZ ÖRVÉNY is cameraman György Petö. His private films shot before and during World War II document his family, and particularly his girlfriend and later wife Eva Lengyel. With hindsight, these films, mainly recorded in the southern Hungarian city of Szeged, make up an extremely wry historical document. Petö was a Jew. Slowly but gradually we notice how the anti-Jewish laws and political revolutions in Hungary take the family in a stranglehold. AZ ÖRVÉNY is a rhapsody of found footage. Skillfully edited and complemented with additional footage, it produces an account of an atrocious era and a plea for human dignity.
