Benedek Fliegauf

Benedek "Bence" Fliegauf, born 15 August 1974 in Budapest, is a Hungarian film director and screenwriter. Originally Fliegauf planned to become a writer. However, he had to abandon his plans due to a lack of finances. Instead, Fliegauf studied to become a stage designer between 1995 and 1998 and was hired as an assistant at Hungarian Television where he went on to become a director and editor.

As assistant director, he studied under Miklós Jancsó and Árpád Sopsits. Fliegauf, who never attended film school, made his directorial debut in 1999 with the documentary Határvonal. Success first came with Beszélő fejek (2001), a film made up of six stories of everyday urban life. Fliegauf received the Award for Best Experimental Film at the Hungarian Film Week for this 27-minute short film.

Positive critical acclaim continued with his next documentary, Van élet a halál előtt? (2002), and the 15-minute short film Hypnosis. In 2003, Fliegauf directed his first feature film. Balanced between comedy and drama, Rengeteg tells stories about the lives of young Hungarians living in Budapest. The film was shot in digital, with amateur actors in leading roles.

Rengeteg was invited to the International Forum of New Cinema of the Berlin International Film Festival and was awarded there with the Wolfgang Staudte Prize. According to the German Filmdienst magazine, the elliptical drama and documentary style of Rengeteg resembled the works of the Danish Dogme movement. Fliegauf himself stated, however, that he had applied the aesthetics of the Budapest School of the 1970s following the work of his famous fellow countryman Béla Tarr.

2004 saw Fliegauf achieve great international success with his second feature film, Dealer, which was also invited to the International Forum of New Cinema at the Berlin International Film Festival. This psychological profile of an emotionally devastated young drug dealer (played by Felícián Keresztes) who ends up killing himself was shot, like many of his other films, without subsidies, with a small team, mobile digital cameras, amateur actors and the help of friends and social networks.

Filmdienst praised Fliegauf for his dark, minimalist episodic film, listing him among the most promising young directors besides György Pálfi. Again, his work was compared to the cinema of Béla Tarr and Andrei Tarkovsky, although Fliegauf himself pointed to David Lynch and Sergio Leone as sources of inspiration. The Tageszeitung also praised Dealer as difficult to sit through, but a must-see film.

Dealer won several prizes at international festivals, including the Best Director Award at the Festival Internacional de Cine de Mar del Plata and the Hungarian Film Week.