A boozy Paris night makes a company man question everything he sold his soul for.
The engineer Ambrus has been suspended in his job because he publicly called the attention of the customers to a construction mistake of some goods designed to be exported. His immediate boss learns the news on a business trip to Paris. He meets his old friend Lendvay, an emigrant from Hungary, and his French wife in a cellar bar. After their talk Benkő starts seeing things in a different perspective. When he returns home, he decides to take a stand for Ambrus against Ferenczi, the general director, despite his wife's and the old director's advice.
Acting
Latinovits burns with quiet integrity; Gábor's slow awakening is devastating.
Direction
Kovács turns office politics into genuine tragedy. The Paris sequence haunts.
Writing
Dialogue that lands like a gut punch: 'We all built this prison.'
Director
András Kovács
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Made during the Prague Spring's brief thaw, the film barely slipped past Hungarian censors who missed its sharper critiques. It was shelved for years.
The 'lost generation' title refers to 1956 revolutionaries scattered across exile and compromise—Lendvay and Benkő represent two fractured paths from the same wound.
HU
