This year everything was different. The long battle between the Budapest Conference Centre and the Corvin Cinema as a venue was decided in favour of a third location, a brand new multiplex in the Mammut shopping centre. Although quite a few in the cinema and arts world took offence over the siting of the Film Week in the Mammut, only Béla Tarr was able, and had the courage, to refuse to show his film there. Consequently, his Werckmeister Harmonies, the festival's opening film, had its Hungarian premiere at the Átrium, appointed as the festival's premiere cinema. Other Budapest cinemas started to screen the film at the same time. This was the Átrium's swan song, a prestigious cinema and an Art Deco gem that deserved a kinder fate, the festival marking its closure. Traditional film theatres are waging a losing battle with multiplex cinemas, and the conflict between the film profession and the government over a draft bill on cinemas seemed to peak during the festival. It was almost as if we had two festivals: there was the official, "millennial", event, and a second one associated with the film profession. The face-off turned out to be more even than expected, the profession was able to hold out against the official will on several debated points, because they had a trump card-an obvious masterpiece. Werckmeister Harmonies had achieved international success and recognition before its Hungarian premiere, and the film was awarded the festival's main prize. Ever since it premiered in the Directors' Week at Cannes, Béla Tarr's film has toured half the world's major film festivals, and was voted the best film of the last five years (1996-2000) by the most prestigious American critics polled by The Village Voice. (A detailed review of the film will appear in our next issue.-Ed's note.)

The situation is brutally simple. The fact that Werckmeister Harmonies was actually made is a miracle. The financial and technical conditions under which Hungarian filmmaking has to work are getting worse year by year. Of the impressively large number of films shown annually at this festival (27 movies this year) every second work is either low-budget or non-budget; the work is frequently filmed on video, with every cost-cutting measure imaginable compensated for by human effort-blood, sweat, sacrifice, and manic devotion. This was how Werckmeister Harmonies was completed: it took almost six years to finish, it was put on ice several times, and the possibility of running out of money was constantly on the cards.

Béla Tarr's achievement is so impressive that for a moment I hesitated whether it was fair to let the other entries compete with it. However, they would look better, not worse, and we, too, will be better off, if we have a standard and absolute scale. And vice versa. Masterpieces do not grow on trees, nor do their makers emerge full-fledged from the film college. Filmmaking is a profession in which practice makes perfect, and a director develops his or her creative style in the course of successive films, rather than all at once. There is no better example to demonstrate this than Béla Tarr's career.

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