Free Fall

  Directed by: György Pálfi Released: 2025 (educational) Year of Production: 2014 Running Time: 80 min Language: Hungarian Subtitle Options: English Closed Captions Subjects: Narrative Feature, Drama                 “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 apartmen