"VISUS", "PRIVÁT TÖRTÉNELEM / PRIVATE HISTORY ", Nemzeti Filmintézet Magyarország / National Film Institute Hungary

Genre: 1. Fictional; 2. Documentary
Content: This programme brings together two pioneering Hungarian short films that engage with the festival theme from complementary perspectives. While “Private History” examines how archival images preserve and reconstruct the past, “Visus” investigates the very mechanisms of seeing, recording, and interpreting visual information. Built from pre-WWII amateur home movies, Private History captures families at play - holidays, celebrations, everyday life - unknowingly set against the approaching catastrophe of history. Péter Tímár's inventive reconstruction of the soundtrack, using lip-reading and imagined period sound, brings this silent archive back to life, making the film an early landmark of found-footage cinema. Visus, made within the experimental Béla Balázs Studio, turns instead to perception itself - anatomy, light, contour, and resonance - offering a poetic meditation on how we see, rather than a scientific one. Viewed together, the films form a dialogue between the archive and the act of seeing. Private History asks how images survive and gain new significance through restoration and reinterpretation, while Visus questions the processes through which images are created and understood in the first place. The pairing highlights cinema not merely as a repository of memory but as an active technological medium that continuously constructs, preserves, and reimagines our relationship with the past.
Year: 1976
Country: Hungary
Date: 28 October, 19:20