Cold Days (black and white Hungarian feature film, 1966)

The Hungarian feature film Cold Days will be screened in the framework of the ELTE Hungarian Summer University in the Carpathian Basin. In addition to the participants of the Summer University, the event is open to all ELTE citizens.

Cold Days focuses the plot on a hitherto silenced historical event, and is a feat of writing, acting and directing that transcends the subject to explore universal questions of responsibility. In 1942, Hungarian army officers ordered a raid in the Bácska region, resulting in the murder of two thousand five hundred Serbs and eight hundred Jews. Three thousand three hundred people disappeared „without a trace” in a hole blown up on the ice of the Danube where the victims were shot. The four participants in the massacre, awaiting their sentences in a common cell, recall the terrible „cold days” of five years ago... The former soldiers recount what happened during those three freezing days. The conversations, approached from different perspectives, reveal terrible secrets.

The Cold Days is an inescapable classic. András Kovács’s work has gone down in film history as one of the greatest feats of Hungarian modernism. Tibor Cseres has brought to the screen a historical fact-finding novel summing up twenty years of research.

Date: 9 July 2025; 18:30

Venue: ELTE University Library and Archives (1053 Budapest, Ferenciek tere 6, Community space from the lobby, ground floor)

Director: András Kovács

Screenwriter: András Kovács, Tibor Cseres

Cinematographer: Ferenc Szécsényi

Main actors: Zoltán Latinovits, Iván Darvas, Tibor Szilágyi, Ádám Szirtes, Margit Bara, Éva Vass

Preview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZEy0rnW4j4

Our guests in the post-screening discussion are Tamás Stark, historian (HUN-REN Research Centre for Humanities, Institute of History) and Gábor Gelencsér, film historian (ELTE BTK Institute for Art Theory and Media Research, Department of Film Studies).

Source/author of illustration: National Film Institute