It's Not the Time of My Life

The well deserved winner of the 2016 Karlovy Vary Film Festival, the biggest east- European film festival. One of the best films of the year.

It's a private study of a couple's problems, the filmmaker himself, starting with their son who behaves erratically, his wife trying to escape the marriage, and it happens it gets dramatic as the wife's sister with her husband and daughter take shelter in their apartment. But unlike in real life external drama does not increase the conflicts, it rather enables lot of possibilities for external evaluation and discussions.

What makes the movie outstanding is besides the positive humanism the outstanding camera work. Despite being a almost low-budget intimate "kitchen-sink drama", which was initially written as a theater project, played by the real family members and friends, Szabolcs Hajdu's camera students from the university change roles in resolving scene by scene, with overall 13 credited directors of photography. You completely have to disguise all your misconceptions of the master of the camera. More people see much more, the perspectives are constantly changing. It reminds a bit on Kurosawa Kiyoshi's excellent student project "Barren Illusions".

I'm not too fond of the too American, soft ending, as in too many similar SXSW movies. I would have preferred a Romanian ending. But I have to admit, it fits the narrative better, even if if might hurt foreign sales.