Pai

Each time I saw "Apa", it was different. the common thing - the feel to be a personal story for me. because, for each boy who lose his father early, a long search remains as basic/fundamental duty. but the film is not only about this kind of search for better self definition. it is a film about Hungary . its past. its need to freedom. its society looking for the right way to be itself. the two themes are mixed. becoming one. and that fact does "Apa" an experience more than an artistic film. because its basic purpose is a sort of exorcism. and to give a map to yourself. surely, a masterpiece. and one of films who, at each new view, for me, remains a strange personal story.

A good film with a nice flow. The beginning shows Hungary devastated by the war and the postwar reconstruction with its communist government. Our hero (Szabo, Istvan) is clearly determined to find out what he can about his father who died young.All he knows is that he was a doctor and perhaps he was an honoured victim of fascism. He never really finds out but his relationship with his mother, his friends and his Jewish girl friend (of course she has to be Jewish - he is the sheygetz) will make him totally independent of this need to find all about Apa or Father. The movie shows a film being made involving the Holocaust and it is a terrific sequence making the extras walk back and forth and back and forth over the bridge to get them miserable and exhausted - an original idea. This film is good and I have seen it several times without being bored.

Over the years, Hungarian director István Szabó has become famous for films like "Mephisto" (about a man who sells himself to the Nazis for status) and "Sunshine" (about three generations of a Jewish-Hungarian family). One of his early movies was "Apa" ("Father" in English), about Tako, a boy in post-war Hungary. Tako's father is dead, and Tako likes to think that his father died heroically fighting the Nazis. But as Tako ages, he starts to question whether or not that's the whole story, and is determined to find out.

Along with this, "Father" looks at the changes that the Magyar Republic underwent after the war. An example is the school's renaming: previously St. Benedict's School, the pro-Soviet government renames it State School. In that sense, I would say that the movie plays a role similar to "I vitelloni" by Federico Fellini and "The Burmese Harp" by Kon Ichikawa, since they looked at the new directions that Italy and Japan were taking, respectively, and how they were having to deal with what happened during WWII. Hungary also had to do this, although it really had to follow the Soviet Union.

Either way, "Apa" is certainly a formidable piece of cinema history. Definitely one of which the people of Magyarország can be proud. Isten, áldd meg a magyart!