Cloud Hunters

Mr Gerzonits prefers red-spotted mushrooms.

The Agent wants to build a motorway where his house is.

But where will the goats and the angels live?

A duel between East and West.

The Hungarian „One Hundred Years of Solitude”.

trailer: vimeo.com/1182896917

Mr Gerzonits, 80, lives in a strange wooden hut in the middle of the forest. The agent arrives with good news: he has money in his pocket and a motorway is being built on the site of his house.

But Mr Gerzonits is not living in the present. He is thinking about the years before the war, his youthful adventures seem like yesterday. Most of the film consists of Gerzonits' memories flickering in and out of the frame. His fleeting memories are linked to the present and intertwined with his dreams and desires. Through his eyes we follow the entire 20th century in a surrealist fresco.

A duel with the agent is taken to the extreme, culminating in a psychedelic mushroom hunt that ends in hospital. The agent understands Gerzonits' values and takes his side. He protects her from the builders and even reunites her with her former lover. By the time the bulldozers arrive, they have both crossed over to another world as new people...

Cloud Hunters are a hilarious carnival of history, from which Gerzonits emerges victorious, proclaiming that our individuality must be preserved at all costs.

Director

Budapest-based Gyula Nemes graduated from FAMU in Prague in the class of Vera Chytilova and Karel Vachek, and the film is clearly influenced by the Czech New Wave.

Selected filmography:

My One and Onlies, feature, Venice Critics' Week

Lost World, Karlovy Vary - Best Documentary

Zero, feature, HU-CZ-GE, Karlovy Vary, with Udo Kier

Production history and team

Cloud Hunters was produced in Hungary with Czech and Slovak financing.

Shot on 16mm film, the present in black and white, the past in colour. The film tells a story with images that cannot be expressed in words. It is more than a story, rather a visual firework.

The old man is played by the Czech Vratislav Brabenec, legendary jazz/punk musician and front man of the band Plastic People of the Universe. He was jailed for signing Charta 77.

The agent is Hungarian film director Szabolcs Hajdu (Bibliotheque Pascal, White Palms).

The cinematographer is Gergely Pálos, who photographed Roy Andersson’s A Pigeon Set on a Branch Reflecting on Existence and About Endlessness and shot Silent Friend by Ildikó Enyedi.