The Investigator

Colour, 35 mm
Hungary, Sweden, Ireland, 2008, 107 min
IP – International premiere
Section: Official Selection - Competition

Synopsis

The hero of this unconventional crime film is 37-year-old Tibor, who works as a pathologist. He leads a lonely life as someone who has problems communicating with people. In the hospital where he works, a few floors up, lies his mother who is dying of cancer. Tibor finds out about a possible cure for his mother’s illness available in Sweden, but this would require the kind of money he just doesn’t have. At this point a mysterious one-eyed man called Cyclops enters his life and offers him the funding he needs if he agrees to carry out an assassination. Tibor accepts the job, without knowing the identity of his intended target. A letter he receives after the killing, however, reveals to him circumstances of which he was totally unaware. Director and screenwriter Attila Gigor didn’t intend his first feature as a spectacle for strong stomachs. In his hero lies an element of poignant vulnerability, as suggested in the highly stylised sequences portraying his inner world.

About the director

Attila Gigor (b. 1978, Budapest, Hungary), sometimes credited as Attila Galambos, studied acting at various Hungarian drama schools. In 2000 he enrolled at the Hungarian Academy of Film and Drama, where he was a student of director Sándor Simó and, after the latter’s death, of Ferenc Grunwalsky. During his studies he made shorts, documentaries and experimental films and became established as a writer-director. After Ágnes Kocsis (Fresh Air / Friss levegö, 2006 – screened at the Karlovy Vary IFF in 2006 in the section Variety Critics’ Choice) and Anna Faur (Girls / Lányok, 2007), Attila Gigor is the third graduate from his year to have successfully completed a feature debut.