Re-release of three films by Judit Elek: Hungary of the Heart

An important figure in the new Hungarian cinema that emerged in the 1960s alongside Miklós Jancsó and Márta Mészáros, the name of Judit Elek, a pioneer of direct cinema born in Budapest in 1937, still enjoys a modest reputation and her sensitive work, crossing documentary and fiction in a gesture that often tends to erase the boundaries, remains little known, despite a recent spotlight at the Cinémathèque Festival in 2024. A few echoes of her beginnings in the film press at a time when the New Waves from the East aroused a certain curiosity, tributes paid at international festivals, and that's about it. Preceding the release next autumn of a box set bringing together his entire filmography (18 short and feature films for the small and big screen), the re-release in cinemas this week of three of his most beautiful films – The Lady of Constantinople (1969), Perhaps Tomorrow (1979) and Maria's Feast (1984) – offers us those rare joys that only cinema now seems to be lavish with: treading on lands little travelled, resurrecting a country encapsulated in an era we would probably never have liked to know, Soviet Hungary of the 1960s and 1970s, or the patriarchal one of the 19th century.

And above all, discover the voice of a filmmaker who has made her "minority" condition, being a woman and of Jewish origin - her family was decimated in the Nazi camps - an essential component