Tutajosok

On April 1, 1882, a 14-year-old girl vanished from a small village in northeastern Hungary. Wild rumors circulated, saying that she had fallen victim to a Jewish ritual killing as part of the celebrations for Passover due to start two days later. Although the girl was found in the Tisza river in mid-June 1882 and had clearly drowned, a defamatory trial against 15 members of the local Jewish community began. Although they were acquitted, the trial was the expression of growing anti-Semitic sentiment in the second half of the 19^th century in the face of the successful “Jewish Emancipation” of the decades before. The so-called Tiszaeszlár Affair formed the basis for several films and books, including by Arnold Zweig (Ritualmord in Ungarn, 1914) and G.W. Pabst (Der Prozess, 1948). Elek wrote the script for her film together with Péter Nádás, one of the most important Hungarian authors of the time who also shared her Jewish roots. Together, they turned the material into an epic, visually striking narrative; Elek made use of the close-up to an unusually large extent for the time and created an astonishing sense of documentary immediacy.