MID-LIFE ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

It was the second year of MIFF and the last year of the millennium when Ildikó Enyedi had her first career retrospective—at this festival. At the time, we said: “Bursting onto the international film scene with My Twentieth Century, winner of the Caméra d’Or for Best First Feature from the Cannes Film Festival, Ildikó Enyedi immediately established herself as one of the freshest and most important new voices in international film. The promise of her stunning debut has been borne out in the remarkable films she’s made since, each one a delightful blend of myth and whimsy, of playfulness and profundity.…Neither time nor space is big enough to contain the imagination of this unique director.” Well, it’s been almost a quarter of a century since that time, and all that is even truer now than it was then as she’s proven in her amazing recent work, including The Story of My Wife (MIFF 2022) and On Body and Soul, which earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film in 2019. Join us in welcoming Ildikó Enyedi and her films once again as we present her with this year’s Mid-Life Achievement Award. —KE

Sunday, July 9 7PM | WOH

Hungary 2018 - DCP - 116 minutes, in Hungarian with English subtitles

Director, Screenplay: Ildikó Enyedi

Producers: Ernõ Mesterházy, András Muhi, Mónika Mécs

Cast: Alexandra Borbély, Géza Morcsányi, Réka Tenki, Zoltán Schneider, Ervin Nagy, Itala Békés

The hugely deserved 2019 Oscar nomination of On Body and Soul for Best Foreign Film of the Year as well as the Berlin Film Festival’s grand prize helped introduce Enyedi’s work to many unfamiliar with it before, and marks one of the finest works of cinema of recent years. On Body and Soul “combine[s] the fantastic and idiosyncratic to beguiling effect [and] rewrite[s] the rules that govern who is deemed worthy of love in the movies. The two main characters in On Body and Soul are Endre, the reserved manager of a slaughterhouse, who hides his emotions along with his useless left arm, and Maria, the new quality-control manager at the plant, who struggles with the banal to-and-fro of social interaction and recoils from physical contact. But at night, she and Endre share the same dreams: a mystical but matter-of-fact connection that transforms both into deer in a sparkling winter woodland….It’s an exquisitely offbeat love story and I fell headlong for its angular, awkward charm” —Wendy Ide, The Guardian. You will, too. —KE Sponsored by Front & Main

Monday, July 10 3PM | MFC 1