On one hot summer night, the residents of a Hungarian apartment house slated for demolition restlessly revisit their haunted pasts as they face an uncertain future. In a gently turning kaleidoscope of dream imagery, regret-laden nostalgia and painstakingly intimate detail, the looming wrecking ball pales in significance to the accumulated experiences each dreamer revisits. Pre-war prejudice, occupying Nazis and Stalinist deprivations all come and go as each tenant's backward glance yields moments of aching sensuality, infectious exuberance and catastrophic loss.

Through an affirming cascade of poetic wanderings through lives lived to the fullest, 25 Fireman's Street plots a personal map of Hungary's fortunes from the Hapsburgs to the Soviets. Conjuring up a subconscious netherworld of metaphor made real, Szabo and his cast paint faces on the impersonal canvas of recent Eastern European history to create a tapestry of personal histories shaped by war. Combining sure-handed storytelling with visual enchantment, 25 Fireman's Street marries the whimsically ethereal with the tragically concrete.
 
"Some of the most lingering images in recent memory."  Carlos Clarens, Soho Weekly News
"Szabo's most ambitious film."  J. Hoberman, Village Voice
"Ambitious,elaborately photographed."  Vincent Canby, New York Times
 


Editor's Note

In a loosely structured series of dreams, sexual fantasies, memories, premonitions, and surreal images, director Istvn Szab enters the minds of the residents of a Budapest apartment building set for destruction. 25 FIREMAN'S STREET is a creatively ambitious attempt to do nothing less than provide a visually emotive history of Hungary from the rule of the Hapsburgs to the aftermath of the Russian invasion in 1956. Each character--including a woman whose husband is dying, a young man who loves two women, and a soldier who fears he'll die in the war--is given a different cinematic feel, tied together by the absurdist dramatic influence of Eugene Ionesco, another Hungarian storyteller.

Unlike Dusan Makavejev in Yugoslavia, whose films such as WR: MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM also deal with life under communism through the use of surreal fantasy, Szab has the unique ability to connect character and personality to dreamy sequences that might otherwise become meaninglessly ethereal. This is not history writ large with great battle scenes and thousands of extras; rather it is an attempt to elucidate that picture not by telling a lot of individual stories in the historical sense but by going within those stories to show people's unfulfilled hopes, nightmares, and memories. The result is a moving, sometimes haunting film that takes the viewer within the psyche of the Hungarian people.


Plot Summary

In Istvn Szab's 25 FIREMAN'S STREET, the residents of an old Hungarian house about to be demolished share collective dreams, memories, and nightmares.