My Twentieth Century

Director: Ildikó Enyedi

1989 / 104min / 4K DCP

Winner of the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Enyedi’s pithy and altogether delightful first feature is a rollicking picaresque period piece shot in luminous black and white and set in the infancy years of cinema, starring Polish actress Dorota Segda in the double roles of orphaned twins Lili and Dóra, the former an anarchist drifter, the latter a well-heeled sybarite, both of them the lovers of one “Mr. Z” (Oleg Yankovsky, of Tarkovsky’s The Mirror) with whom they will travel into Hungary aboard the Orient Express. Eagerly rummaging through the tropes of early film style, Enyedi creates a rich, ravishing evocation of the idealism, invention, and creeping decadence of fin-de-siècle Europe.

4K digital restoration by the Hungarian National Film Archive