Merry-Go-Round

Zoltán Fábri’s striking film is a powerful love story set against the turbulent changes to rural life in 1950s Hungary. In her dazzling debut performance, the late, great Mari Törőcsik plays a young girl who falls for a farm worker, but is betrothed against her will to a wealthy man.

Gorgeous free-wheeling camera work combines with expressive editing and evocative use of music to powerfully convey the freedom love offers in the face of repression. This rich, beautiful film is widely considered one of the finest in Hungarian cinema.

Mehelli Modi

Zoltán Fábri (1917–1994) – Hungarian Director, graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts and acting faculty of the School of Dramatic Art in Budapest. His filmmaking career started as early as in the 1940s when he made some social realist style films, but he managed to surpass the ideological forms with the internationally appreciated melodrama Merry-Go-Round (1956) and tragicomedy Professor Hannibal (1956, awarded in Karlovy Vary). Fábri’s talent flourished in the 1960s, when he made his most distinguished works in the atmosphere of liberalisation of censorship. The most outstanding films by Fábri include: the reckoning Twenty Hours (1964, Grand Prix in Moscow), social and political drama Late Season (1966, awarded in Venice), popular adaptation of the novel by Ferenc Molnár The Boys from Paul Street (1968) and the war film 141 Minutes from the Unfinished Sentence (1974, awarded in Berlin).

9th New Horizons IFF Catalogue