It’s evident that, during the ’70s, a major piece of Europe’s film action shifted east of the Rhine. The West German cinema overextends, the Polish renaissance has stopped dead, but—increasingly confident—Hungary continues to produce a forbiddingly ingrown, sporadically popular cinema of impressive quality and intelligence.

The author of subtle, unsettling films that mix defamiliarizing hyper-realism with a stringent lyrical streak, Zsolt Kézdi-Kovács seems the strongest filmmaker from the “generation of 1956.” An assistant to Miklós Jancsó for much of the ’60s, Kézdi-Kovács’ first features were