Wheelchair accessible, SDH captioning, English subtitling
Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival presents My 20th Century (Az én XX. századom) as the opening screening of its inaugural first edition in 2022. Ildikó Enyedi's 1989 debut, My 20th Century went on to win 'Camera d'Or' for Best First Film at 1989 Cannes festival and was screened as part of the Official Selection at the 2018 Berlinale Classics.
In 1800s Budapest, two impoverished twin girls, Dora and Lili, are separated from each other, and their lives are taken in vastly different directions. Decades later, the twins – one an anarchist who is planning a bombing, the other a manipulative socialite – meet on the Orient Express in a twist of fate.
This film can also be watched online (Sep 27 - Oct 13) thanks to our partner Klassiki.
Content notes: Depictions and discussions of poverty, sex, alcohol consumption, nudity.
Access notes: Bright black and white cinematography, some flashing images and loud sounds.
Curated by Harriet Idle
Director’s statement
By the end of the 19th century, those brave and wonderful people – Edison and the likes of him – all of a sudden, within a few decades, put into action the childhood dreams mankind had cherished for millenniums, which had always seemed illusory. To see and to hear into the distance, to fly about in the skies, to hide under water, to lock up your voice in a box, to steal your face, figure and movements from death and grant them eternal life, to stop time, to wind it back, to repeat it, to turn night into day... surely, it is not surprising that Edison was called a magician. It was something essentially different from the industrial revolution, or any other technical feat of earlier times, or ever since. These cheerfully bold ones were characterized by an intimate and everyday intercourse with the impossible, and by an infinite faith in the capacities of man.
By 1900 the grounds were prepared – so they thought – to turn the Earth into a Paradise for all its inhabitants. It was just up to man to let it happen. That’s why this film is concerned with people instead of great historical events.
“Let’s go back on the road, down to the junction where every way other than the one we went down in the century that was to follow, had seemed simple and viable” – a viewer of the film said. That’s why the film takes place at the turn of the century, in the age of great inventors, of global expos, but also of relentless plotting, of hanged student girls and banished, imprisoned teenagers.
Director’s biography
Ildikó Enyedi was born in 1955 in Budapest. She studied Economics and Filmmaking at the University of Budapest and later in Montpellier, France. She has started her career as a concept and media artist. She was a member of the art group Indigo and the Balázs Béla Studio, the only independent film studio in Eastern Europe before 1989. She later turned to feature film directing and script writing, wrote and directed five features and several shorts. With these works she’s received more than forty international prizes. Enyedi received the Golden Camera Award for the best debut-film at the Cannes Film Festival for My 20th Century (1989) and was chosen as one of the 12 Best Hungarian Films of All Time and selected among the 10 best films of the year by The New York Times.