Ema & Death’s-Head deals with the precarious border between humanism and the protection of one’s own life in situations when one excludes the other. Marika Sándorfi is hiding a Jewish boy during the dramatic era of the First Slovak State on the Slovak-Hungarian border. Šimon Holan, the boy in hiding, has a special ability to survive thanks to dreaming and a child’s fantasy.
As a result of a drug experiment, Misi will be able to travel through time, but only if he drinks from a special homemade spirit.
The renowned anarchist teacher Count Ervin Batthyány reappears 100 years after his death. He tries to put his theories into practice again, as he realises that the world has not turned out as he had expected. He founds a new free school with the help of some like-minded people, and starts teaching a new generation who believe in solidarity and cooperation, rather than a system of oppression. But the ideal of freedom and equality awakens the same fears in the choreographers of power as it did 100 years ago. And after an encouraging start the count and his new friends come up against more and more obstacles.
Iván is living in exile from Hungary when he receives word that an old flame is ill. His return to Budapest rekindles old memories and reopens old wounds.
Kapa, Pepe and Mesi would like to buy a scrapyard of trains, to start a nostalgia train and earn a lot of money. The capital to start with they want to get from grandpa, who has come home from America with a suitcase full of money. Everybody wants Mesi to approach the old man, because she is the only one he would speak to. But Mesi is more concerned with the idea that she wants a child, by now from anyone, while Pepe is jealous. Kapa’s alleged son emerges, with the mafia behind him: they, too, are eager to get grandpa’s money. After threats and blackmailing, poisoned apples are sent, with only one side of them poisonous. Those dead, by the way, are resurrected by the sound of a song. At last, nobody manages to get the money, but it wouldn’t make sense anyway: it’s all fake. The Statue of Liberty, however, turns out to be blind.
In the Kerepesi Street cemetery, three grave diggers contemplate the fate of the world, then they step out of this role and in a sequence of episodes they play the typical figures of contemporary Hungarian reality, the fat cat, the swashbuckler, the victim, underworld chieftains, and present little absurd dramas of love, marriage, friendship, public order and legal safety. The author and the film director walk among them all the time, contemplating, laughing at their plays. The stories starting from the graveyard and returning there warn of the inevitability of death. The author and the director (Gyula Hernádi and Miklós Jancsó) wisely make friends with death.
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