Watch out for spoilers!
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Once upon a time, my acquaintance with the films of Istvan Szabo began with the film Mephisto, which I watched in our film club, and it made a very strong impression on me. I watched the other German films and something else. This year, I reviewed the trilogy and at the same time decided to get acquainted with some of his early films, watched the film “A Movie about Love”, and today I watched the film “Father – Diary of One Faith” / Apa, 1966. In principle, it was necessary to first watch “Father”, and then “Film about love”, which seems to continue the theme, even the main character is played by the same actor – Andras Balint, but this is how I got the opposite. Both films are said to have some autobiographical motifs. In Father, we see a boy whose father died immediately after the war in 1945 come up with the image of a father he desperately needs. Only fragmentary pleasant memories and some things have survived from his father, he was a surgeon, after the war the boy wants his father to be a hero, so he invents that he was a partisan, committed heroic deeds, his image blooms in the boy’s imagination and acquires various actions, although in fact he worked all the time as a doctor. As he grows older, he continues to support the legends for a while, even telling them to his girlfriend. Some time after his girlfriend tells him about her spiritual struggles, then considering herself Hungarian, then believing that you should be yourself and not hide the fact that she is Jewish, he finally confesses to her that he really does not know anything about his father, and what he told, he invented himself. There comes a moment when he realizes that it is time to finally become himself, it is time to swim across the Danube himself, so that his grandchildren can one day tell that their grandfather has repeatedly sailed across the Danube. I liked the movie.