According to the news released by the Hungarian Academy of Letters and Arts, the president of the academy, the Hungarian "New Wave" standard-bearer and the famous film director Károly Makk passed away on August 30 local time at the age of 91. His works such as Liliomfi, Love, Cat's Play and Another Way were shortlisted for the Cannes Film Festival six times, with Love winning the Grand Jury Prize in 1971.
Karoli Mark was born on 22 December 1925 in the small eastern town of Bairaigio in Hungary. Because his family ran a movie theater, he was inspired by cinema very early. After World War II, Mark entered the Budapest Academy of Drama and Film Arts, where he studied under the famous director Géza von Radványi. While still in his studies, he and Félix Máriássy, another representative of the Hungarian "New Wave," participated in the film "Somewhere in Europe, somewhere in Europe," directed by his teacher Radwani, written by film theorist Béla Balázs.
In 1971, his most important work, Love, was published. Based on two novels by Hungarian writer Tibor Dery, the film is set in the 1950s and tells the story of a terminally ill old woman who looks back on her past life at the end of her life while worrying about the future of her son, who is a film director in the United States. However, her son was imprisoned for political problems at the time, and the kind daughter-in-law was afraid of the old man's sadness and painstakingly woven a beautiful lie. At the end of the movie, the son is finally pardoned, but he still can't see the last side of his mother.
After "Love", Mark completed another of his masterpieces, Peekaboo, in 1975. Through the correspondence between a pair of sisters, the film shows the different life journeys that their father has taken after their father committed suicide because of being slandered. "Peekaboo" was not only shortlisted for Cannes, but also nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, but unfortunately lost to Coppola's "The Conversation" and Fellini's "I Remember, Think Of That Year" (Amarcord).
Among Mark's later works, the more famous ones are The Gambler and A Long Weekend in Pest and Buda, based on Dostoevsky's semi-autobiographical novels.
Throughout Carolly Mark's life, perhaps the biggest regret is that he was shortlisted for the main competition section of the Cannes Film Festival six times, but he did not have the opportunity to pick a leaf of the Palme d'Or. However, many of his outstanding works are not only treasures of Hungary, but also the jewels of the world film industry.