2008 | Hungary, USA | 160 min
Screened at SFJFF 2009
If you have never seen a Péter Forgács’s film, you are missing one of cinema’s most virtuosic, genre-bending practitioners. Immerse yourself in found-footage alchemist Forgács’s 15th film in the “Private Hungary” series—films artfully assembled from archival collections of home movies. I Am Von Höfler is a beautiful fusion of footage shot by Hungarian Tibor Von Höfler—the son of a Christian industrialist father and a Jewish mother—and photos, letters and contemporary interviews. Von Höfler, a bon vivant, chemist, piano-playing dilettante and cad, was spectator to a history that included the German invasion of Hungary, the Holocaust and the rise and fall of Communism.
Like a medium leading a séance, Forgács uncannily brings to life the past and the flawed humanity that even witnesses to the gravest events of world history display. He edits the voice of Tibor’s mistress begging for money over images of Tibor jauntily playing his piano; Tibor’s mother’s letters over his erotic photos of women; and, in a coup de grace, an image of Tibor floating happily in a lake with voice over from his Aunt Szera’s letter describing conditions in the Jewish Ghetto. Forgács (2008 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival Freedom of Expression Award) once again slices through the vortex of time with this extraordinary documentary elegantly scored by Tibor Szemzö and László Melis.
—Nancy K. Fishman
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