Snail Fortress 2004

Directed by Dezső Zsigmond

Although Terezka is almost forty years old, she still lives, single and childless, in a village in Transylvania, a place that is well-known for the nearby snail fortress. She lives with her parents, who treat her like an overgrown child, and with Dezsökem, a divorced, single man, whose love for Terezka is not reciprocated. In his second film Zsigmond documents an ordinariness and everydayness filled with indifference. The tension in the relationship between parents and daughter, her inability to free herself from them and live on her own, evokes a melancholy mood that seeps into the glances and gestures of the film’s lonely heroes and into every aspect of the life of one Hungarian mountain village.