Silence and Cry

NEW 35mm PRINT!  │ Hungarian master Miklós Jancsó is working on a more intimate canvas in this follow-up to the epic one-two punch of The Round-Up and The Red and the White, but still very much concerned with the terrible, tyrannical impact of power, politics and history. An elliptical, claustrophobic drama shot in the brilliant, breathtaking long takes that are Jancsó’s trademark, Silence and Cry is set after the fall of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919. A young Red soldier, fleeing the anti-Communist manhunt, takes refuge at the isolated farm of a peasant family. His reluctant hosts are already under police scrutiny for being politically suspect. The local White commander is aware of the soldier’s presence but, for personal reasons, keeps it a secret. The soldier discovers that the farmer is being poisoned, slowly, by his wife and her sister. "A masterly, hypnotic stylistic exercise by a major director...Jancsó’s depiction of the suspended reality and Kafkaesque despair produced by war is now complete" (Don Allen, Monthly Film Bulletin). "A newly intimate, domestic level [for the director]...Jancsó’s characteristic sequence shots turn the chamber drama into a political thriller pregnant with wider connotations" (Tony Rayns, Time Out).  B&W, 35mm, in Hungarian with English subtitles. 73 mins.