Free Fall

 “What tea do you want? We’ve got some mint tea,” mutters an old woman to her apathetic husband. She then goes up to the roof of her apartment block from where she surveys Budapest’s evening skyline. And she jumps.

Plunging past the apartments that fill her gray Communist block, and their inhabitants, her fall sets a mise-en-scène in which György Pálfi allows the viewer brief glimpses into the strange and darkly comedic lives of this microcosm of contemporary Hungarian society. Free Fall masterfully demonstrates Pálfi’s powerful visual style, whose spectrum ranges from sci-fi to social realism, but which is interspersed throughout with elements of the grotesque, surrealism and absurdity.

One by one, the viewer is introduced to the small worlds inside the apartments of this nondescript Communist-era building, each one telling a story more incredible than the last: from a hyper-hygienic couple who make love through plastic to avoid bodily contact, to a woman who

wants her baby put back inside her, and a boy who seems to be the only one who sees the proverbial bull – in its terror-inducing full size – in the flat.

Free Fall was commissioned by the Jeonju Film Festival, and has since gone on to win numerous awards, including the Best Director Award and Special Jury Prize at the 2014 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, and a nomination for Best Feature at the Chicago International Film Festival in the same year.

György started shooting experimental Super 8 movies and began making a name for himself while still in school at Budapest’s Theater and Film Academy (1995–2002) where he studied direction. He drew international attention with his writer-director feature debut Hukkle, honored with a European Film Award for Discovery of the Year, and at more than 100 festivals in the world. His second feature, Taxidermia debuted at Cannes Un Certain Regardes and among several prizes received the Best Director Award at the 2006 Transylvania International Film Festival and Antalya IFF. After his experimental improvisation movie, I Am Not Your Friend, his fourth long feature Final Cut – Ladies and Gentlemen was the closing film of Cannes Classics in 2012. 

To date he has directed seven features, many shorts, theater plays, VR360 shorts and also commercials and music videos. In 2024, extensive retrospectives of György's work were hosted in both New York and Los Angeles.