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PRODUCTION Hungary

Popfilm pins its hopes on The Citizen and The Wednesday Child

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- The outfit headed by Károly Fehér is about to kick off the shoot for Roland Vranik’s third feature and has Lili Horvát’s first opus in post-production

Popfilm pins its hopes on The Citizen and The Wednesday Child
Director Roland Vranik

Acknowledged as one of Hungarian cinema’s most promising filmmakers since his feature debut, Black Brush (named Best Film at the Hungarian Film Week 2005), which he followed up with Transmission (which won an award at Seville in 2009, among other accolades), Roland Vranik has found his way back to the set in Budapest this month in order to shoot his third feature, The Citizen [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile
]
. For this movie, which will tackle the delicate subject of integration via a love story revolving around an immigrant, the filmmaker has decided to call exclusively on the services of non-professional actors and to make as little use of technology as possible in order to render the movie as realistic as he can.

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Written by the director together with Iván Szabó (who turned heads recently thanks to his work on Land of Storms [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Adam Csaszi
film profile
]
), the lead character in the story is Wilson, a fifty-something originally from sub-Saharan Africa who lost his family in the atrocities of war and subsequently found a safe haven in Budapest as a political refugee. For several years, he has been working as a security guard in a supermarket, and he now has just one goal in life: to become a Hungarian citizen...

Produced by Károly Fehér for Popfilm, The Citizen has received production support from the Hungarian National Film Fund, among other sources of funding. It is slated for theatrical release in 2016.

Popfilm, which was involved in producing Free Fall [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile
]
by György Palfi, among other titles, is currently buzzing with activity, as the company also has The Wednesday Child, the feature debut by Lili Horvát, in post-production. Starring such names as Kinga Vecsei and Zsolt Antal, the film (the screenplay of which was written by the director herself) recounts the misfortunes of a young couple living in the suburbs of Budapest. Maja and Krisz are 19 years old and met each other while they were at an orphanage together. They have a four-year-old child whom they have lost custody of. Krisz doesn’t want to know anything about it, while Maja desperately wants to get him back. When they win a grant that opens the door to a microcredit for underprivileged entrepreneurs, it suddenly presents the young woman with an opportunity for a fresh start...

Co-produced by German outfit Detailfilm, The Wednesday Child benefited from backing from the Hungarian Film Fund, the Media Programme and the Filmförderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein fund, among other sources of financing.

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(Translated from French)

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