Gyerekgyilkosságok

Zsolt is a lonely twelve-year-old boy who lives with his sickly and seriously alcoholic grandmother Bizsu. The boy frequently wanders alone along the river Danube, from one secret place to another. One day Zsolt meets a young, pregnant gipsy girl, Juli. He becomes her friend and companion. Their friendship makes Ibolya, a girl from school who lives in the neighbourhood, jealous. The consequences are disastrous.

COMMENTARY
In one of the most godforsaken neighbourhoods of Budapest lives the twelve-year-old boy Zsolt. He is nicknamed Soda bottle by a girl in the neighbourhood who thinks his glasses look like the end of bottles. Zsolt lives with his alcoholic grandmother in one of the houses that were part of huge building projects during the Communist era. His mother is long gone and his father appears to have remained unknown.
The grandmother, who was once a successful actress, demands a hundred percent attention from the boy and does not tolerate any talking back. Zsolt sneaks about her, calls her Madame, sings songs from cabarets and makes sure that her glass of brandy is always filled. In his free time he makes excursions to the river banks of the Danube. One day, during one of his excursions, Zsolt sees the gipsy girl Juli. He begins to follow her around. The girl lives alone in an old railway carriage. They become friends and discover that they both have something that they would like to get rid of. Increasingly preoccupied by their new friendship, Zsolt doesn't notice that the girl from next door is spying on him and the gipsy girl. The three children's Follow the leader game develops into an increasingly illfated triangle drama.
Iidiko Szabo's second feature film Child Murders is based on a fifteen year old manuscript. The story is based on an event that was related to her by a police officer and it
has been made into a remarkable and poetic film. A film whose theme and visual language is combined with a peculiar restrainment och where the music is playful and waltz-like and threatening and piercing by turns.
More than anything Child Murders is about loneliness. Zsolt is incredibly lonely. To feel that he is alive he stands on the railway tracks and jumps just as the train is about to run him over. Only then will he laugh for real.
One question that springs to mind is why Szabo has chosen to make this horrific story so beautiful. This painfully pleasant movie does not in fact aesthetesize cruelty into sentimental melodrama. There are always traces of human life, in Juli's railway carriage, in Zsolt's grandmother's musty bedroom, on the long steps down towards the Danube, in the concrete viaducts, among rusty barrels and in the sandpits. To show it as beautiful does not take away the sense of self-respect possessed by the people and their environment. In these areas of Budapest, some of the most run down and poorest parts of the city, the grandeur, the serenity and the charged atmosphere co-exist with the social destitution.
In Child Murders the child is not able to find peace of mind or fit into a technologically cold social system. Zsolt has to put on an untruthful performance to keep his grandmother in full vigour. Juli carries a child she hasn't asked for and which is probably the result of a rape. The fat girl next door always wears newly washed clothes, but her existence is still tainted by the jealousy she feels. The greatest tragedy of them all is that without the circumstances the children are in because of adults, they are nothing.
The calm, dazzling days in Child Murders is contrasted against pitch black darkness. The lights of the night are only artificial and cannot illuminate what the water of the Danube is swalloving. The innocence of childhood is lost with a broken street bulb. ':'
Cristel Nyqvist

Medverkande
Barnabás Tóth, Ilona Kállai, Mari Balog: Producent
Hétfoi Muhely: Manus
Ildiko Szabo: Foto
Tamas Sas: Musik
Janos Masik: Talat språk
Hungarian