dialogue: Kálmán Nagy

One of the prominent directors of his generation and crafter of the critically acclaimed masterpiece The Other End of The Street, Kálmán Nagy was a member of the main jury in apart’s Usak Film Festival XI back in December 2024 and we cruised together in Istanbul. As we were all busy during the UFF’s final run, we postponed our interview to Spring for some fresh air we all desperately needed. As Barış Akgüney asked and Erinç Durlanık framed, Kálmán answered gently from his visionary mind and soul; so enjoy… Here’s a teaser of his work;

Creating associations, opening space for the audience’s imagination can be a preference of directors. I think you do this with sound, do you have such an intention? Do you think that sound is an effective sense to mobilise the audience’s imagination?

Yes, it’s an important dramaturgical tool that I enjoy to use. Sound has a far more direct impact on the subconscious. This artistic approach not only extends the cinematic world beyond the frame but can also generate tension. When you withhold direct visual content and offer something else instead, the audience is forced to rely entirely on sound. In response, the brain instinctively begins to construct its own images — and that experience can often be even more engaging. That’s why my sound designer and I dedicate considerable work to exploring the sonic possibilities of a film from the very beginning, even during the script development phase.

Films like Relatos Salvajes imply that man has a wild nature. Can we say that your film also has such an emphasis? Do you think man has a nature? If so, what is man’s relationship with his own nature?

Unfortunately, I saw the film quite some time ago, so I can’t clearly recall its central themes. In my film, I was mainly interested in examining aggression toward children, though this inevitably included violence in a broader sense as well. Man is capable of both violence and profound compassion. There’s an old story that speaks to this duality: within each person live two wolves — one representing kindness, the other representing aggression — the one we feed is the one that survives. Understanding ourselves is often a challenge — defining the essence of humanity is even more so.

Although you show a part of the story in your films, you manage to draw the frame in the minds of the audience with the right associative elements. You complete your film in the audience’s mind. How do you achieve this?

That’s a question that touches on many aspects — from writing, directing, cinematography, and editing to sound design. What matters most to me is involving the viewer in the film. I want them to reflect, to be challenged, to engage their own judgment, and to question things they might never have considered before watching the film. I think, great films don’t serve up easy answers — they pull us into the heart of the questions they raise, giving us space to consider our own responses. I think the best films are the ones that start in the viewer’s head after the screening.

Adolescence is a strange period. Is there a reason why you leave the boys alone with their fathers in the film while making them the subject of the film, while the mothers are obscured?

Father–son relationships tend to resonate with me on a deeper emotional level — probably because of my own experiences, though that’s not the only reason. In an earlier draft of the script, both mothers had more prominent roles, but the limitations of the short film format made it clear that the story needed a tighter focus. Shifting the narrative toward the fathers and exploring how each of them deals with conflict felt more thematically coherent — and ultimately, more effective for the story.

In the film, we see that a wind of lies is always blowing. But there is also an emphasis on the practicality and actually the functionality of lying. Do you ever lie in your films?

My characters lie in my films. But they are always given the opportunity to decide what to do with the lie. But is telling the truth always the right thing to do? We think of lying as inherently bad, but I am interested in the contradiction of what happens when we do more harm than good with the truth. I’m drawn to the layered moral questions this dynamic brings up.

In one of your statements, you say that ‘empathy is like a muscle, if you don’t train it, it weakens’. Can we say that you make your audience exercise by constantly changing the location of the focus of identification in your films?

Everyone has an individual perspective on the world and an individual life story. To understand this perspective, we must try to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes. We don’t have to agree, but a multi-perspective mindset helps us to understand reality better. Being aware of each other’s pain, frustration and fear can be a key to building mutual understanding and we need a deep level of empathy in order to do so.

Themes such as home, garden and neighbour come to the fore in your cinema. It is very valuable to know that the way to the universal passes through the local. Does your cinema have a connection with your town, can you tell us a little about it?

Although I’ve been living in Vienna for 12 years now, I still feel a strong connection to the

Hungarian countryside. That’s where I grew up — it’s where I absorbed the unique cultural

and social atmosphere that continues to shape me. I think that’s why I’m most drawn to that

environment: it’s something I know instinctively, in my bones.

As a filmmaker, there’s always a creative advantage in working within a world that feels authentic — one that you truly understand. My family has always supported me in this, and my friends and relatives from back home have regularly appeared in my films and helped me a lot.

Your cinema looks like a house where a family lives. A house seems to tell us about the families that once lived in it. What is your relationship with the house? What kind of houses have you lived in or would you like to live in?

That’s a very poetic question. Houses and their surroundings reveal a great deal about the

people who inhabit them. A home becomes an essential extension of both character and milieu. For some reason, the kitchen often becomes the focal point around which I construct dramatic situations. It’s typically where you encounter most of your family members. Shared meals can be moments of connection—but just as easily, they can become arenas of conflict. It’s the place where daily frustrations are often released onto loved ones.

There’s also a ritualistic structure to it: a beginning, a middle, and an end. A single shared meal has the potential to spark a disagreement that lingers for days.

From a production design perspective, it’s always important to me that characters exist within

richly detailed environments. A densely furnished space lends the film a sense of realism, almost like a documentary.

Every creation bears traces of its creator. And your films definitely have elements related to you. But we can follow with admiration that your judgements never cloud your films. I think it is difficult to achieve this. How do you achieve this? How can the education you receive be related to this?

No two people are the same, and no two experiences are identical. In an increasingly polarized world, it’s essential that we don’t give up our openness and willingness to re-evaluate. It takes effort—but I wouldn’t appreciate being judged based on my background or a single comment taken out of context, either.

Sometimes we don’t even fully understand those closest to us, so why are we so quick to form opinions about people we’ve never even spoken to for five minutes?

This is a key question in my films: show the person in different situations. Show them being harsh with someone—but also show them being gentle. Show them acting unfairly—but also show that life is unfair to them too.

I think you make a cinema that tells people about human beings. Does our cinema have such a purpose? Do you aim to contribute to the development of humanity with the films you make? 

There are films that have had a powerful and lasting impact on me—especially in shaping a more open, humanistic, and empathetic way of thinking. The filmmaker who created those works likely has no idea that his films are still working within me, subtly influencing how I see the world. Maybe somewhere in the world there is a person in whom my film has made a small difference – something I will never know about. But I don’t need to. The mere thought of that possibility is more than enough.

studio shoots are from Studio Zade and still images are from “The Other End of The Street”.

https://www.nagykalman.com