He was a Hungarian film director and screenwriter.
He directed 25 films between 1966 and 2007.
His 1975 film, Mrs.
Dery Where Are You? won the award for Best Actress (Mari Törőcsik) at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival.
In 1986, his film Első kétszáz évem was entered into the 36th Berlin International Film Festival.
In 1993, his film Whoops was entered into the 43rd Berlin International Film Festival.
Kató Kelemen is asked by her father to go to his office and welcome an important business partner of his. When Mr. Andersen arrives he assumes Kató is a secretary and instructs her to deliver a letter. He's about to travel to Venice with his nephew who he has never met before. Since Kató falls in love with Andersen at first sight, she decides to dress like a boy and pretends to be the nephew.
Janos Flandera (Frigyes Funtek) is a student who is kept by an older woman in this depressing drama. When he applies to a prestigious school in Moscow, he is turned down because he is a gigolo. Not only is his scholarship request denied, he is sentenced to a year in prison at hard labor. Janos abandons the jealous older woman who helped deny his entrance to the school. Punished after defending a political prisoner, Janos takes solace in love affairs, but his union with the crippled daughter of a prominent political official puts his life in danger.
The main character of the story which takes place in the twenties in Budapest is the poet Dr. Rácz György, who returns after ten years of absence. In a café he meets his former friend Lajos, who has just broken up with his lover, Márta, because of the wife of professor Büchler. The transiently formed, rootless Rácz gets entangled into the sophisticated, complicated love affairs of bored or tired ladies.
An interview with the Hungarian poet, János Pilinszky.
Dery is a grande dame actress of the Sarah Bernhardt school of big-gesture theater. Her beauty and popularity is fading, and a new school of acting which involves the use of one's own emotions (a-la Eleanora Duse) is emerging in the person of her younger Viennese rival. She thinks of retiring from the stage, and reunites briefly with her estranged husband in a newly-built manor in the country. Finding that life there is boring, she returns to town, the theater, and her old friends.
Two arts students, András and Viktor who are writing their thesis on detective stories, make up a story and keep nagging the famous film-director, who just came back from Hollywood, until he undertakes the job. At night they work on the film, in which two youths kill a director returning from the US. In the morning the director is found dead - a knife in his back.
The film, paying a tribute to the memory of Endre Ságvári, a Communist hero, goes back to the summer of 1944. Through Colonel Gombos-Götz who has recognised that the Nazi-Germans will be ultimately defeated, Ságvári, the leader of the Young Communist Workers' Association asks Csiszár, the commander of the barracks in Andrássy street to provide him with guns to help release the Communist prisoners in Tata.