István Szabó

Istvan Szabo has emerged as one of the most important Hungarian filmmakers of the 20th Century. The Central European experience, from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the Warsaw Pact, is the key to the content of his films as well as their symbolic structure. There may even be an implied metaphor in a film like "Colonel Redl" (1985) between the complex social atmosphere and political issues in the old imperial dynasty and the modern people's republic. His output perhaps reached a culmination in 1999 with the epic "Sunshine," which followed the rise and fall of a Jewish Hungarian family from the late 19th Century to the mid-1960s.