Written & Directed by Peter Strickland
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A LIBRA FILM - PETER STRICKLAND production Written & Directed by PETER STRICKLAND CREW Director and Screenwriter /// PETER STRICKLAND Sound /// GYÖRGY KOVÁCF / Zoltán KARASZEK Editor /// MÁTYÁF FEKETE Director of Photography /// MÁRK GYÕRI Producers /// Tudor Giurgiu / Oana Giurgiu / Peter Strickland Production Company /// LIBRA FILM Music /// STEVEN Stapleton & GEOFF COX A LIBRA FILM - PETER STRICKLAND production CAST Katalin Varga /// HILDA PÉTER Antal Borlan /// TIBOR PÁLFFY Orbán Varga /// NORBERT TANKÓ Etelka Borlan /// MELINDA KANTOR Gergely’s Brother-in-Law /// SEBASTIAN MARINA Gergely /// ROBERTO GIACOMELLO Zsigmond Varga /// LÁSZLÓ MATRAY PRODUCTION company KATALIN LIBRA FILM Popa Soare st. N°52 - Bucharest 023984 - Romania Tel: +40 2 13 26 64 80 - Fax: +40 2 13 26 02 68 [email protected] www.librafilm.net WORLD SALES MEMENTO FILMS INTERNATIONAL VARGAWritten & Directed by PETER STRICKLAND 6 Cité Paradis - 75010 Paris - France Tel.: +33 1 53 34 90 20 - Fax: +33 1 42 47 11 24 [email protected] www.memento-films.com PRESS IN BERLIN Magali Montet: [email protected] Mob. : +33 6 71 63 36 16 84 minutes - Color - Hungarian/Romanian - Dolby SR - 1:1.85 - 35mm Martin Marquet: [email protected] Whit the support of: CNC - Romanian National Film Centre - HAI-HUI Entertainment Mob. : +1 310 927 5789 SYNOPSIS Banished by her husband and her village, Katalin Varga is left with no other choice than to set out on a quest to find the real father of her son, Orbán. Taking Orbán with her under another pretence, Katalin travels through the Carpathians where she decides to reopen a sinister chapter from her past and take revenge. The hunt leads her to a place, she prayed eleven years prior, she would never set foot in again. Interview with THE DIRECTOR After a first short, your very first feature film is selected in Competition at the Berlinale, where did you get your inspiration from ? There hasn’t been a single year between 1992 and 2008 in which I wasn’t involved in some form of theatre, film or music. It was a ’nowhere’ in the sense that I and a small group of friends were completely invisible to the establishment. We made our work available and everything we’ve done is still out there if people care to look for it. But the doors we knocked on were always closed. This ’nowhere’ was a very real and exciting place where lots of work got done; not all of it good, but all relevant to what is happening now. Please, tell us something about yourself. How old are you? 35 Where are you from? Reading, UK. It’s a town that lies between London and Oxford. Oscar Wilde was thrown in prison there. That says everything about Reading. Did you study filmmaking? No, I did fine arts. I went to amateur theatre and Super 8 groups. There was and still is a very good amateur theatre in Reading called The Progress Theatre. I learnt much about directing by taking small roles in plays and working my way up to directing my own adaptation of Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”. Afterwards, making short films and stupid mistakes in the process was a big education. I learnt to work quickly with as few people on set as possible. What made you know that you could be a filmmaker? Why did you choose to shoot in Romania? Immense delusion. That actually helps. If I sat down and logically thought about the risks involved, I’d never even pick up a There was no specific reason for Romania – the mountains and the journey there wasn’t pen. a torture. The film has nothing to do with Romania or the relationship between ethnic Hungarians and Romanians. I spent some time researching the different cultures in Who inspired you and who helped you fulfilling your dream? Transylvania, but felt I was losing the grasp of the film. No matter how much or how Seeing David Lynch’s ERASERHEAD at London’s now-defunct Scala cinema on Saturday February 10th 1990 changed my life. It little I know about doing an authentic representation, I’ll get it wrong. I’m a foreigner was totally different from anything I’d known before. I was just a sixteen-year-old kid from Reading and this strange, beautiful – a total outsider. But with that, I thought I could bring something fresh. For me, this piece of atmosphere absolutely set me alight. It was such a strong, intense experience, especially with the industrial hiss and film represents Transylvania – not in the Dracula sense. But everything is heightened clank of the soundtrack. From then onwards, I couldn’t stop going to the Scala Cinema at the weekend, after school, sometimes – the goat bells, crickets, wind, etc. It’s a conglomeration of what I felt as an outsider. during school. That was my film school. The programming was totally schizophrenic: New York underground, sleazy European Everything about this film is about being an outsider. Katalin’s character, my English art porn, creepy Italian horror mixed in with Fassbinder, Cocteau, Jarman, Bunuel, Tarkovsky and many other greats. There were status, and the fact that we were outside the film industry fighting to do something many directors I could only read about in the days before the Internet: Stan Brakhage, Jordan Belson, Tony Conrad, Jack Smith, on our own terms. That energy (and sometimes desperation) is there and I’m quite Kenneth Anger and Alexandro Jodorowsky. All those films had that much more mystery and power when you had to get on the proud that we communicated that. If people find the film sympathetic to Romanian or train to London or really hunt them down. As convenient as the Internet is, you do lose a degree of exoticism now. Transylvanian life, I’m incredibly flattered. But I would never be so presumptuous to say we are making a Romanian film. For Katalin Varga I wanted to write around very traditional themes of revenge and redemption. The subject of revenge runs so deep in society and is full of contradictions. Personal revenge is by law a crime whereas political revenge is sanctioned. And The location was connected with the story? it’s one of the few crimes that we can all understand. Revenge brings on counter-revenge and where do you go from there? The location, yes. Since I was working within the context of a ballad, I needed a Regarding redemption, I wanted to take a character responsible for a terrible crime and present him as someone very kind, mountainous and rural environment. gentle and loving. The notion that ’bad guys’ are always ’bad guys’ is nonsense. Every ’bad guy’ is surely a ’good guy’ to someone. It was essential that I didn’t allow the audience to hate the character of Antal. If they hated him, they would have And how did you choose the actors? fallen into the same trap as Katalin. I had a friend in Sfântu-Gheorghe called, Pal Bela Vendel. He kept saying how he had the perfect Szekely actress for me, Hilda Peter. I met Hilda and her friends and they all What was the shooting like? appeared in the film. They’re all from the theatres in Ciuc and Sfântu-Gheorghe. The It was something very romantic and exhilarating for all of us. There was a very strong feeling of ’us against them’ and that theatre in Sfântu-Gheorghe has Romanian actors, so Sebastian, Florin, Fatma, Andrea aggression is so central to the film. I was angry and depressed about many things, but managed to turn it into something very and Raluca came from there. Norbert had appeared as an extra in DOLINA. enriching for all of us. I felt on top of the world during that time. To make a film officially would have a very different dynamic. In which language did you talk? Hungarian? English. Typical English man, I know. Sorry. Interview by Iulia Blaga BIOGRAPHIES PETER STRICKLAND /// Director Born in Reading, England in 1973. Adapted and directed Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” for amateur theatre in 1992. Since then, he’s made several Super 8 and 16mm short films. His most well-known short film, BUBBLEGUM (USA, 1995/96) brought Andy Warhol superstar, Holly Woodlawn out of a long hiatus and screened at Berlin in 1997. He also founded the musique-culinary group, The Sonic Catering Band in 1996 with friends from Reading, releasing several records and performing live throughout Europe. The band also released field recordings by entomologists, sound poetry and Filmography: modern classical in very limited vinyl editions. 1996 BUBBLEGUM Katalin VARGA, his first feature film, was made entirely Officially selected for Berlin, Edinburgh, London and New Zealand International Film Festivals, USA - 15 minutes independently over a four-year period. After seeing a rough cut, 2004 A Metaphysical Education Libra Film came on board and funded the post-production. Peter Officially selected for Bratislava and Melbourne now lives in Hungary where he teaches English. International Film Festivals, Hungary - 3 minutes Cast HILDA PÉTER /// Katalin Varga Born in Sfântu-Gheorghe, Romania in 1978. She studied at the Faculty of Theatre Arts in Tîrgu-Mures, graduating to become a resident actress at the Tamási Áron Theatre in Sfântu-Gheorghe TIBOR PÁLFFY /// Antal Borlan from 2001 until 2006, performing in a multitude of plays by Born in Târnaveni, Romania in 1967. After studying at the Shakespeare, Beckett, Sophocles and Bálint Balassi. She has University of Theatre in Târgu Mures, he became a resident actor been awarded for several roles, including ’Best Female Actress in at the Figura Studio Theatre and then the Tamási Áron Theatre. a Secondary Role’ in 2005/6 by both UNITER (The Theatre Union He has acted in several films since 1998, including Dallas of Romania) and The Hungarian Theatre Critics.