‘The Hungarian Dressmaker’ Focuses on a Dark Slovak Past Many Try to Forget
variety.comWill Tizard Contributor Slovak director Iveta Grofova says she became fascinated with one of the darkest periods in her country’s recent past when she read Peter Kristufek’s book “Emma and the Death’s Head,” which tells the story of Marika, a Hungarian widow who shelters a young Jewish boy in her home.
Set near the Hungarian border during WWII in the Nazi puppet Slovak state, the novel embraces the imagery of the Death’s Head Moth, whose pattern reflects the same skull adopted by the Nazi SS, to force readers to confront a period Grofova says most Slovaks would prefer to forget.
This was part of the appeal of adapting it for the screen, she says – but what really interested her was the perspective of Marika and impossible decisions she would be faced with.
Thus, “The Hungarian Dressmaker,” as she called her film, screening in the Karlovy Vary fest’s main Crystal Globe competition, moves its point of view from that of the boy in hiding to his protector. “I was attracted by the topic of the emergence of the wartime Slovak state,” Grofova says. “It is such a dark childhood of my country, which the Slovaks have not yet come to terms with.” As Marika, who works for a Jewish tailor, finds herself jobless in a time when everything’s in short supply and state police thugs are hauling off valuables – and suspect residents – from every house they want to enter, Marika is facing existential threats from the first moments of Grofova’s film.
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