AllMovie

Made by Hungarian filmmaker Istvan Szabo as an entry in the Scottish BBC television series Director's Place -- a program devoted to offering insightful self-portraits of the world's great filmmakers -- this highly symbolic venture is more subtle than other entries in that it focuses not on Szabo directly but rather upon the historical events that shaped his life and viewpoint. The film begins in 1938 the of Szabo's birth and is largely comprised of documentary footage shot in Budapest's Hero Square from that point to the present. Many of the images, ie film reels being hacked apart with an axe to symbolize censorship, are quite metaphorical.