Oscar-winning Hungarian director of ‘Son of Saul’ fame, László Nemes Jeles has brought his second full-length feature, ‘Sunset’, to compete at the 75th Venice Film Festival. It then heads to the Toronto Film Festival to premiere in North America before being screened in Hungarian cinemas at the end of September. In 2016, the director’s first feature, acclaimed Hungarian Holocaust drama ‘Son of Saul’, became the second Magyar-made movie to win an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, taking top prize at Cannes and a Golden Globe in the same year.
Budapest, 1913. Having grown up at an orphanage, a young Hungarian girl, Írisz Leiter, moves to the city with the hope of becoming a milliner at the prestigious boutique of her deceased parents. But the current owner of the Leiter Hat Store, Oszkár Brill, rejects her. Írisz finds out from a stranger that she has a brother, Kálmán. While looking for her family, Írisz discovers dark secrets, and gets caught up in the turmoil of a society fated to fail.
“Sunset is about the failure of a society. I was not interested in decadence, but in the fall itself, when from one second to another everything falls off at its zenith. Sunset’s world is adventurous, multi-layered, problematic and unpredictable at the same time – for me this is the most exciting element in it. I did not direct a classic costume drama, but aimed at presenting the rhythm of life, where everything is in constant motion, causing surprises all the time,” said director László Nemes Jeles after shooting was completed.
Sunsetwas shot over 53 days during the summer of 2017 at various locations around Budapest and rural Hungary. The main setting of the film, the Leiter Hat Store, was created in the beautiful Budapest neighbourhood of the Palace District. For two years, the film’s creators had been looking for the ideal lead actors until finally finding Juli Jakab (Írisz Leiter) and Vlad Ivanov (Oszkár Brill). In addition to nearly 100 Hungarian, Romanian and German actors – some already featured in Son of Saul – about 4,400 extras were used in the film. Sunset comes to Hungarian cinemas on September 27th.
