Happy New Life

Colour, 35 mm
Hungary, 2007, 81 min
Section: East of the West - Films in Competition

Synopsis

The film is set in the present, in an unidentified Hungarian town. The young Romany boy Attila was brought up in a children’s home and, having come of age, is completely unprepared for life in the outside world. On his own initiative, he is given access to information about his family and hopes that this will help him find his place in a world in which he finds himself totally abandoned. However, he has strong memories of the day he was separated from his parents, and the promise of a “happy, new life” for Attila still seems very remote. For his feature debut, director Árpád Bogdán partly draws on his own experiences. He grew up in a children’s home until the age of 14, cut off from the world around him. He basis his testimony not on the powerful story, but on the compelling atmosphere of dispossession, which he creates with the aid of stylised images and minimalist music. The film Happy New Life won an award for best debut and best music (Hungarian Film Week 2007).

About the director

Árpád Bogdán (b. 1976, Nagykanisza, Hungary) before making several shorts and his feature debut Happy New Life, he studied social welfare, Romany and pedagogy at Pécs University. In addition, he became established in his original field as a stage actor and director. He was also a painter and published poetry in newspapers and anthologies. He brought these disciplines together in his most recent project, a production of a monodrama on eminent Hungarian poet from the first half of the 20th century, József Attila.