Please tell us about the projects you worked on before making ‘Mannvirki’. How did you start, and how did you learn to make films?
My first feature, Carcasse, premiered in 2017 in Rotterdam. I had been working on visual art projects, like film and video-installations, drawings and paintings. My films gather from all of this and their set or the shooting locations are quite like my outdoors atelier at times, they are experimentations. I studied in art schools, briefly in Budapest but later in Cergy-Paris. It was more dedicated to contemporary image practices, there we watched films and some of the teachers were filmmakers.
Tell us about ‘Mannvirki’. How do you describe it?
It's Landscape. Wounded or damaged landscape with a huge building in the center of it. It has its own story, glorious but also very painful and sad. You don't learn anything about its initial function and story watching the film. This man made structure is there like a living entity, existing on its own as part of nature - decaying. Now halfway submerged in saltwater it serves as an observatory, there are many little abstract stories happening in nature there and details; micro events to be noticed. The film isn't anthropocentric. There are humans but their personas, or who they are, is all secondary in the exploration as with other living beings or organisms. You may follow them and you see them, sometimes close but often from a far. Always working in repetitive everyday choreography, sometimes it's intelligible but mostly it's for the decomposition and absorption of that structure. They are like enigmatic part of this site, lost in the landscape and its time.
Please tell us about your favorite filmmakers.
Varda, Flaherty, Dreyer, Bresson, Conner, Peleshian. Snow. They are maybe not necessarily all my favorite filmmakers but they often come quickly to mind and I have known their films for a while and probably I saw possibilities through their works and I learned from it. I come from a background in visual arts and this often influences me when I work on my film projects; especially paintings but sometimes also more contemporary works or mediums.
If you were given a good budget, what would be your ideal project?
I don't know if I will ever have an ideal project. Projects come with ideas from observation and slowly start to grow in my head, independent of budgets. I usually need some funds for my films, it's necessary, but it also can be very limited and I would always manage to do things however.. My films take a long time in the making and there is lots of work but still they are minimal and sparse.
Describe how you would ensure that production is on schedule. What steps would you take?
Taking time, and the film itself, are more important than the schedule. In the beginning during production there are phases when I work a lot alone and it takes its time. In post production, I work much more closely with important, talented people; producers, editor, sound-designer, composer etc and I have been very lucky to work with them and also to have the production on schedule, thanks to them.
What was the hardest part of making ‘Mannvirki’.
To wait, when it was completed, to have it screened. There were some halts during post production and some due to Covid also. I think it's when you can't do anything and waiting becomes difficult.
If possible, tell us about your next work. What plans do you have for your future work?
It's an experimental feature film and the working title is “Shadowline” It's about water and the invisible, the utopic Islands – vanishing. The contingent is always at the horizon of the film. It is a «floating» image and thus drifts between unknown worlds and distant locations on the earth's global grid to explore water, different bodies of water. Recent changes in them, obvious causality or circumstances and then what the eye can't see: micro-organism and metabolism, radiation as well as the human memory fragments.
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