Children of Glory
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Children of Glory |
| Original title | Szabadság, szerelem |
| Country of production |
Hungary Great Britain |
| original language | Hungarian |
| Publishing year | 2006 |
| length | 123 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Krisztina Goda |
| script | Joe Eszterhas |
| production |
Andrew G. Vajna Tamás Zákonyi S. |
| music | Nick Glennie-Smith |
| camera |
Buda Gulyás János Vecsernyés |
| cut | Éva Gárdos |
| occupation | |
| |
Children of Glory ( Hungarian : Szabadság, Szerelem) is a Hungarian feature film from 2006.
action
In 1956 the Hungarian national water polo team played a game against the Soviet Union in Moscow . They are clearly the stronger team, but the game is manipulated by the referees and Hungary loses. The star of the Hungarian team is Karcsi Szabó. After the game, he and his teammates clash with the Soviet players in the dressing room. Back in Hungary, Karcsi immediately has to undergo an interrogation by the Hungarian secret service . Shortly afterwards, the Hungarian uprising breaks out. Karcsi falls in love with the politically active student Viki Falk during the unrest. From now on he is torn between the political events and the preparation training of the national team for the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne . Karcsi has to choose and chooses Viki and politics. He takes part in the occupation of the State Broadcasting Building in Budapest . He resigns from the national team. When the Soviet soldiers left Budapest and the insurgents had won victory, he returned to the team. When the team leaves Budapest on the bus, they realize that the withdrawal of the Soviet army was only faked. Large numbers of tanks are heading towards Budapest. But there is no turning back for Karcsi. While the team is at the Olympics, the uprising is crushed. The team doubts whether it still makes sense to take part in a sporting event. However, the coach can convince them that winning the Olympics is so important for the Hungarian people right now. The team finally made it to the semi-finals unbeaten, where they met the Soviet Union again. The game is an extremely brutal confrontation and goes down in sports history as the blood game of Melbourne . The pro-Hungarian audience is also causing the situation to heat up further. When the score was 4: 0 for Hungary Karcsi was bloodily beaten by a Soviet player with a punch, tumult led to the game being abandoned. After the Hungarians won the final, the Soviet players were on the podium with the bronze medal among the victorious Hungarians.
background
The real story of the Hungarian water polo team is the greatest box office hit in Hungarian film history. Since the premiere in October 2006, over 400,000 viewers have seen the film in Hungarian cinemas. The film premiered in the United States on December 6, 2006. The film celebrated its German premiere during the Berlinale 2007 .
The Hungarian original title of the film comes from a well-known line of poetry by Sándor Petőfi .
Reviews
- kino-Zeit.de: The 123-minute mammoth work likes to make ample use of the Hollywood bag of tricks. Moving string music accompanies the obligatory love scene; Timpani determine the background noise to the bombs exploding in the background. Elaborately crafted war scenes appear overloaded at times and obscure the view of the sparsely woven facts. The film tries to connect the love relationship with the struggle for freedom and Karci's inner conflict, who moves between career and moral responsibility. If the film had dispensed with some clichés, director Goda would have been more careful with the historical material; the film would have escaped the opulent force. In this way, however, Children of Glory works like a national epic that carries out strict juxtapositions between good and bad in order to be powerfully emotional. Nevertheless, the westernized viewer gets an insight into a little-known chapter of the story, which comes to its full advantage at the end of the film. The Hungarians' water polo team met the Soviets in the finals of the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne, while the popular uprising in their homeland was crushed by Soviet tanks. As the climax of the film impressively shows, the game was bloody and ended prematurely with a 4-0 for the Hungarians. Given this interesting story alone, it would be desirable for the film to be distributed in Germany. This would pave the way for a controversial discussion of the 1956 uprising beyond the Hungarian borders.