Ottó Szabó

Lint and his lover are sailing and making fun absent-mindedly at Lake Balaton when the anchor suddenly gets stuck in a bomb in the mud. Lint gets hurt while fussing about under the water. A strong storm breaks out when they reach the shore. In the local restaurant the man recalls his memories of war.

Kiss, an engineer, accompanies his wife to the maternity ward. He wants to leave the woman because while he was away in Brazil, she did not undergo an abortion as they had agreed before. While he is packing up at home, the memories of the sweet events of their life together keep coming to him, one after the other.

In this somewhat uneven political satire, good revolutionaries have overthrown a totalitarian state riddled with corruption on all levels when a truly naive bureaucrat (Boguslaw Linda) is placed on a jury that will judge the results of a history competition. Once on the jury, the young bureaucrat starts looking into the past himself and gets embroiled in a labyrinth. The past may well be unclear because recent leaders have certain facts that need to be kept buried. Filmmaker Janos Kovacsi borrows characteristics from revolutions in the Eastern European block (1950s-1980s) to create this post-revolutionary society with an idealist commander (Ferenc Zenthe) meant to lead them. A clue as to what happens next lies in the opening scene -- the funeral of the commander who has given his life for his cause. Ironically, Kovacsi undoubtedly faced censorship on this film. That would not only account for some uneven narration, but it adds a dimension of reality to the topic at hand.

This film describes the narrator's childhood, the years before and after the Hungarian Soviet Republic, in a burlesque and fabulous style and with the humour of a child's fantasy.

December 1956. The region by the Tisza is evacuated because of a threatening flooding. Laci, Karcsi and Péter leave their home on the lorry