1945

Hungarian director Ferenc Török has been making short films, documentaries, TV movies and features since 1999, but the sepia-toned 1945 is his first film to ever sniff a stateside release. The movie opens on the morning of August 12, 1945, as news reports of the Nagasaki bombing arrive over the radio in a small Hungarian village. Despite the lingering presence of Russian soldiers, an impending wedding seems to signify a return to homogenized “normalcy,” but the arrival of two unknown Jewish men dressed in black threatens to expose the town’s legacy of collaboration and theft. As the men in black slowly approach, the corrupt town clerk scurries to cover his crimes, while the townspeople begin to fall into a debilitating spiral of shame and guilt. Simultaneously dreamy and sobering, 1945 is an impeccably acted examination of the moral fester of the Holocaust, although the conclusion lacks the necessary impact.