Ildiko Enyedi

The Golden Bear in Berlin in 2017 has breathed new life into it. After 18 years without being able to direct a feature film, the Hungarian Ildikó Enyedi has proven her sensitivity as a filmmaker thanks to the unique love story that she consists of “En cuerpo y alma”.

Ildikó Enyedi was born in Budapest in 1955. She was the only girl in her class at the Budapest University of Cinema and Performing Arts, an institution where she would become a professor years later. Curiously, in her student days she assures that she did not observe discriminatory behaviors, when she was the rare and exotic creature, so to speak; On the other hand, she did observe something of this when, giving her lessons, there were more women in the classrooms.

Conceptual artist, he has worked for the art group InDiGo (INterDIszciplináris GOndolkozás, Interdisciplinary Thought) and the Balázs Béla studio (BBS), where his compatriots, filmmakers such as István Szabó and Béla Tarr , have developed their talent, and who has an open line of work to the experimental proposals of young people who are making their way.

After a few short films, she triumphed at Cannes, winning the Camera d’Or with My 20th Century (1989), set in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, about two twins who are completely unaware of the other’s existence, and who have led different lives. Both end up coinciding on a train trip, the Orient-Express. The film, shot in black and white, already points to very personal signs of identity, where chance, affective deficiencies, marked lives and dreamlike passages unfold. Enyedi’s career was beginning to take off, just as the iron curtain was falling. She would make this and other subsequent films in Hungary in co-productions that involved other European countries, such as France and Switzerland.

Magical elements, chess, love and heartbreak, along with a child’s perspective, made up The Enchanted Hunter (1994), which was followed by Tamás and Juli (1997), a peculiar love story that takes place in a mining town. Then would come Simon, the magician (1999), where the police turn to the title character to solve a crime.

From this moment there is a “gap” in the filmmaker’s career, who continues with her work in the world of teaching, where apart from classes at her “alma mater”, she is required to teach lessons at other university centers , in Switzerland and Poland, or to form part of juries at different film festivals.

Her personal inquiry into human psychology throughout her filmography enabled her to work on television in the series Terápia , the Hungarian version of the HBO television series En terapia , where she is accredited in 37 episodes.

After triumphing in Berlin with En cuerpo y alma (2017), a sensitive feature film about the need to uncomplicate to achieve love, Enyedi lives a sweet moment. She has shown that it is possible to make a personal, lyrical and symbolic cinema, and handle the world of dreams in an original way, without falling into simplifications or psychoanalytic commonplaces. As the director affirms, when describing the coincidental dreams of the two protagonists, “her world of hers is simple and transparent, but it is full of meaning, it is a place where we can recognize ourselves”.