Elek explores The Eighth Day of the Week
"We live in a world where people feel more and more threatened, where their living conditions are becoming insecure, whether it is their work or their housing…an unhealthy era of immoral greed and accumulation of wealth." It is on the basis of this observation that Hungarian director Judit Elek began writing, producing and directing her sixth feature, The Eighth Day of the Week (A hét nyolcadik napja), which opens today in Hungarian cinemas by Hungarotop.
Selected at the 1969 Cannes Critics’ Week with The Lady from Constantinople, in the 1984 Un Certain Regard sidebar with Maria's Day, and at the 1996 Directors’ Fortnight with her documentary To Speak the Unspeakable: The Message of Elie Wiesel, Elek – who also won a FIPRESCI Prize at the 1978 Locarno Film Festival for Maybe Tomorrow – picked up Best Screenplay for The Eighth Day of the Week at the Hungarian Film Week in February.
A tragicomedy starring Maja Komorowska, The Eighth Day of the Week follows the misfortune of the elderly Hanna, a retired actress who is evicted from her apartment and finds herself homeless and forced to sleep at the train station.
Set against the backdrop of the embezzlement of the mafia, which forms a kind of substitute state, Hanna manages, against the odds, to find hope once again through a chance encounter.
"I wanted to deal with these themes without making the audience cry and show that despite the bitterness that always exists that someone is capable of showing humanity in the midst of inhumanity…a force that transcends suffering," explained the director.
The €865,000 Dánielfilm Studio production also features Franciszek Pieczka, Judit Hernádi (Hanna magyar hangja) Sándor Gáspár, Gyula Bodrogi and Eszter Csákányi.
Another Hungarotop release this week is Nincs Kegyelem, a Tivoli Filmprodukció and Objektív Filmstúdió production. The film is the second feature helmed by the renowned and multiple award-winning cinematographer Elemér Ragályi (winner of a 1996 Emmy Award).
Another of the films arriving on screens this Thursday (which also includes two US films) is Budapest Film’s release of Lars von Trier’s Danish title The Boss of it All [+see also:
trailer
film profile].
(Translated from French)
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