“A deep breath of Kaurismäkian deadpan” (Eddie Cockrell, Variety), this confident, understated debut by 25-year-old director Ágnes Kocsis won the prize for best first feature at the 37th Hungarian Film Week, and was also selected for the Critics Week at Cannes. Fresh Air charts, with great economy
and wit, the eccentric rituals and regimens of the lives of mother Viola (Júlia Nyakó), a Miss Lonely Hearts with a bottom-of-the-barrel job as a subway toilet attendant, and daughter Angéla (Izabella Hegyi), who has big dreams of becoming a fashion designer. The two share a cramped Budapest apartment, and seem, on the surface, to have very little in common, save for a weekly TV program they both enjoy. But the differences between them are deceptive, and their emotional bond runs deep. “Kocsis treats her characters with a real love and insight. Critics have excelled in their comparisons — the Dardenne brothers, Loach, Chantal Akerman — and Kocsis clearly knows her cinema. . . [She] does not employ mood and style for its own sake — it is part of a deep and absorbing identification with her characters” (Peter Hames, London F.F.). Colour, 35mm, in Hungarian with English subtitles. 109 mins.

Three Lodz Film School grads address Polish youth trapped between an Iron Curtain past and an uncertain future in the ironically titled Ode to Joy ... The picture’s tripartite structure looks at how three individuals in different parts of the country deal with the lack of opportunities” (Jay Weissberg, Variety). In the first and strongest segment, “Silesia,” directed by Anna Kazejak-Dawid, a young woman returns to Poland after years working and saving in London to find her miner father on strike, her beautician mother unemployed and her old boyfriend interested mostly in her money. In “Warsaw,” directed by Jan Komasa, an aspiring rap musician faces the disapproval of his girlfriend’s nouveau-riche father. In the final episode, “Pomerania,” directed by Maciej Migas, a university grad, dumped by his girlfriend, returns home to the Baltic coast, where only menial work is available to him. The film won a Special Jury Prize at the annual Polish Film Festival in Gdynia. “Ode to Joy is strongly reminiscent of other ‘generational films’ from the history of film, such as the Polish ‘moral-anxiety’ cinema or work by young makers from the Czechoslovak new wave” (I.F.F. Rotterdam). Colour, 35mm, in Polish with English subtitles. 112 mins.