On Body and Soul wins Camerimage

Congratulations to Cinematographer Máté Herbai, HSC, for the Golden frog at this year’s Camerimage film festival. The hungarian film is about A blood-soaked slaughterhouse is one of the least romantic places for two delicate and sensitive souls to start an intimate relationship.

But it is exactly there, among the daily work of cutting cows’ corpses into pieces of quality meat, that Endre and Mária begin their tender love story. He is the establishment’s manager, a middle-aged man with a paralysed hand who is detached from the outside world. She is a recently hired quality inspector, much younger, painfully shy, and unable to cope with the intricacies of human relationships. Their connection first materialises in a dream they both share every night – in it, they are a deer and doe roaming freely through a snow-covered forest. In time, they discover they can offer each other much more in the daylight. The question is, will they be able to transform this fragile connection based on an ephemeral dream into a strong bond in a world ruled by carnality and sexual gratification?