Just The Wind

Bence Fliegauf's Just The Wind (Hungary, 2012) - This looks very much like a documentary, but it isn’t. A test of endurance for most audiences, requiring enormous patience and curiosity, it will most probably cater to a minuscule market of Fliegauf fans that have seen and appreciated his earlier work, films like Dealer and Milkway, in which he made the same demands on its viewers. Nothing seems to happen in the course of the first 90 minutes, except that it is all preparatory stuff which really makes sense only in the light of the climactic ending. The premise here is a series of violent attacks on Hungarian gypsies perpetrated in 2008 and 2009. Homes were burned down with Molotov bottles, five people were injured by shotgun fires, six were killed, 55 other people were severely harmed. This, however, is not a reconstruction of those cases, but rather Fliegauf’s comment on them. The focus here is not on the offenders but on their victims, his entire film following one poor, humble gypsy family. RATING: 7.