Direction: Attila Szász
Country: Hungary
A soviet labor camp in 1944 Ukraine becomes the glacial stage of excruciating episodes. Attila Szász’s Eternal Winter, which was based on the book by Janos Havasi and inspired by several accounts of ethnic German Hungarian prisoners, tells the story of Irén (Marina Gera), a diligent mother who promised her young daughter she would come back home from the wheat harvest she was summoned to. Instead of that task, and against her expectations, Stalin’s Red Army forces her to work in backbreaking coal mines under unsafe and inhumane conditions.
Among the physical and psychological difficulties, she was lucky enough to find the vital love of a Yugoslavian prisoner, Rajmund (Sándor Csányi), from whom she learns all the tricks to survive in a hostile environment.
One cannot deny that Eternal Winter is a moving journey, but Szász couldn’t get rid of certain stereotypes commonly associated with the genre. The film is unfussy but flat in tone, visually arresting but emotionally vacillating, ultimately dramatizing when confronting challenges and resolutions.
The last section wastes most of the emotional gravity previously built, and when the tears begin to roll, it’s the indifference that settles. The predicaments are not in the script, co-written by Szász and Norbert Köbli, but in the approach.
