Last night at the award ceremony of the Hungarian Film Festival, Los Angeles, Bijan Tehrani as president of the jury of the festival announced the Best Film Award of the festival:
“I am fascinated by the quality of Hungarian cinema, every single film that we watched is done beautifully regardless of genre. Therefore I want to congratulate Mr. Bela Bunyik and all the other individuals and organization that have made this festival to happen.
I am supposed to announce the film that has won the best film award, but this year for the first time in history of Hungarian Film Festival Los Angeles we had an absolute tie! Two films came head to head to win the award with exact same number of points. As president of the jury I was asked to pick one of them as the winning film, but I found it unfair to leave out one of these two beautiful films and therefore the decision was that they both share the award.
The first film is about the tragic journey of young woman living in poverty to find happiness elsewhere in the civilized world only to learn that when it comes to women we are still living in dark ages. Our first winner is one of the best films ever done on modern human slavery. This film is no other than Viktoria, a Tale of Grace and Greed made by Men Lareida.
But the second winner of the best film masterfully reconstructs an important event in history of Hungarian freedom fighters. Filmmaker not only stays faithful to the real event, but also manages to recreate the emotional state of the event and its characters. Language of filmmaking has been used at its best in making the film and performances are brilliant and cinematography and edit is breathtaking. Our second winner is The Ambassador To Bern directed by Attila Szász.”
