Slideshow
PREPARATIONS TO BE TOGETHER FOR AN UNKNOWN PERIOD OF TIME
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MUST END THURSDAY, MARCH 11
NY Times Critic’s Pick
Hungary’s official submission to the 2021 Academy Awards® for Best International Film
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY LILI HORVÁT
Hungary’s official submission for the Best International Film Oscar®, PREPARATIONS… is a psychological mystery set in Budapest. Beautiful young neurosurgeon Marta (an entrancing performance by Natasa Stork) meets another doctor, Janos, at a conference in the U.S., and plans a rendezvous with him at Liberty Bridge, on the Danube. Yet he never shows. She trails him around the streets of Budapest, but when she approaches, his response baffles her: “I don’t know you. This is the first time in my life I’ve ever seen you.” How could this be? She left a cushy New Jersey hospital to return to Hungary to start a new life with him. Did she imagine their romance, and the commitments he made? Is he gaslighting her? In sessions with her therapist, Marta fears she may be losing her grip on reality. But the truth may be more complicated. Shot with an enigmatic visual palette inspired by the work of New York photographer Saul Leiter, PREPARATIONS… confronts our expectations and the role of our imagination when in love. “Superb. Slippery, supple and sinuous, Hungarian director Lili Horvát’s deliciously reworked psychological noir is a spiral staircase, polished to a glossy shine, down which unreliable motivations, self-delusions and romantic obsessions tumble in gorgeous 35mm.” – Jessica Kiang, Variety
HUNGARY 2020 95 MINS. IN HUNGARIAN WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES GREENWICH ENTERTAINMENT
Virtual Cinema program supported by the Robert Gore Rifkind Foundation.
Reviews
“Part low-key stalker thriller and part woman-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown character study, anchored by [Natasa] Stork’s ever-shifting performance as the slightly unstable medical professional.”
– David Fear, Rolling Stone
“A PUZZLING ROMANTIC MYSTERY. Such a mouthful of a title, poetic and unwieldy, belies the starkness of Hungarian writer/director Lili Horvát’s haunting and mysterious second feature, a kind of amnesiac love story crossed with the gloomiest of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s movies, and bordering on an existential science fiction… It’s absolutely gorgeously shot by cinematographer Robert Maly, glowing with a brittle beauty in contrast to the sulky exteriors of Budapest…
This one sticks in your head.”
– Ryan Lattanzio, Indiewire
“A multi-layered rumination on love, fate and the way individuals construct their own sense of reality.”
– Allan Hunter, Screen Daily