Class lot

Gyorgy Peto, an Hungarian businessman and musician, took a large number of home movies. Like many film hobbyists he chose to record the special days and lighter moments in life; his wife Eva on holidays, a new baby being bathed, daughter Kati at her birthday party, and his nightly job playing viola in the Budapest Metropolitan Operetta. Director Peter Forgacs takes these “private histories”, which date from 1946 through to the 1960s, and creates an evocative family portrait, layering the sequences of affectionate domestic images with footage from other sources that reveals the much harsher “official history” of a Jewish family during the Second World War and the communist era of the fifties.

Woven into the soundtrack is the voice of the adult Kati, who reminisces about her youth and her relationship with her parents. As a child of holocaust survivors, there was much that could not be spoken about. Kati remarks, “I always felt things were somewhere else, not where I was.” The more we learn about the experiences of Gyorgy, Eva and their extended family, the more the transient moments of casual happiness captured by the home movies grow in emotional power. This exploration of memory and history, presence and loss is supported by the music of Tibor Szemzo.