Hungarian filmmaker Dénes Nagy was a special guest of the 30^th edition of the European Film Festival in Bucharest. His latest film, the documentary Kurtág Fragments (Kurtág-töredékek, 2026), had its Romanian premiere during the festival, and Dénes Nagy answered the questions of the spectators after the screening. With the support of the Liszt Institute – Hungarian Cultural Centre Bucharest, I managed to interview the Hungarian director, finding out more about both the important composer György Kurtág and Dénes Nagy’s views on cinema (including Romanian filmmakers).

Q: After being awarded the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin Film Festival in 2021, for Natural Light (Természetes fény), your first feature film, you continued your directing career, quite unexpectedly, with a documentary about the Hungarian, Romanian-born composer György Kurtág. How did you decide to make Kurtág Fragments?

A: This was not my initiative. I got a telephone call, and I was asked if I would be interested in making this film. I had never made a film like this. So, it was something unexpected and new. And I was suspicious about this, because I don’t like it when somebody tells me a topic. I like to find my own topics. Of course, I had heard about Kurtág. I knew that he’s one of the most legendary composers today in the world, as well as one of the most esteemed ones. Surely, I was interested. So, I went for a meeting with László Gőz and the producer Julianna Ugrin. László Gőz is a musician and a very special person. He is also a businessman and the owner of a music institute in Budapest, called the Budapest Music Centre (BMC).

Q: As I understand, György Kurtág currently lives in the BMC building.

A: Yes, he lives there. Kurtág and his wife, Márta, lived in France, in a very small village near Bordeaux, for 15 years. They had already got old and sick, and ten years ago, László Gőz had the idea to contact them and invite them back to Budapest, where he provided an apartment for them in his own institute. It was a very special offer, and the Kurtág couple accepted it. They moved back to Budapest, where they got an apartment in the attic of the BMC building. It is a guest apartment, a very small but also very nice one. And it was very good for the Kurtág couple, because they suddenly found themselves surrounded by people, not isolated in a faraway village, but in a place where they could be reached by musicians and other composers, and they could be part of the music world. They also had a musical surrounding with a concert hall, an amazing musical library, and the best instruments that Kurtág could use. So, he became part of the world again. But it was also very good for the musicians and other people who wanted to reach him, because it had been very difficult to contact him before. I think it was a win-win situation. László Gőz also had the idea of the film. When I got the phone call, Kurtág was already 95, and his wife had died a few years earlier, so he was alone. László Gőz realized that it may be the last moment to make a film about Kurtág. So, I went to this meeting, and I expressed my doubts: “Why should I do this film? Is it really my topic at the moment?” And they told me two things that interested me. The first was that I would get total freedom, so I could do my own film. The second was that they were not interested in a film about the legendary composer, but about the man behind the legendary composer. I really liked this idea. Of course, then I asked for a meeting with Mr Kurtág himself. It was right away very clear that he’s a very interesting person for a film, especially because he has a face that is so unique. It’s unique because it’s full of emotions; everything that is going on in his head, you can somehow see in the little changes on his face. I believe he is a very spectacular character in the film. I have always been searching for interesting faces. This is what I also did in Natural Light, somehow: to observe a face for a very long time and to see, through this face, inside somebody’s head. It’s an interesting thing and, with Kurtág, it was an amazing possibility that I could observe him for a long time. You can look at his face, and you don’t understand exactly what is going on, but you can still have the feeling that you are looking into somebody. I think this is what interests me the most: to be able to look into something, to somehow go into the darkness, into somebody’s head, without understanding exactly what’s going on. You feel that there’s something going on, but you don’t need to understand everything step by step. You just enter somebody’s head.

Q: I’ve watched some of your films, starting with a short documentary film, Berlinskaya Fuga (2009), that you made while studying directing at the University for Theatre and Film of Budapest (SZFE). Even there, in that short student film, you were more like an observer than a director who interferes with his subjects. Would you agree?

A: Yes, and it is very interesting that you point this out. When I went to film school in Budapest, all the directors I met were different than me. They were always trying to dominate the situations and to be the centre of the film. They had very clever instructions to the actors; they were like psychologists. However, I never felt at ease with this kind of directing. And it took me a long time to understand that what I really like, as a director, is to sit behind and just observe things. At some point, I accepted that this can also be an adequate characteristic of a director. It’s possible to be a director and just observe. This is not something that is against being a director. Of course, the meaning of director is that you direct, but you direct in a different way. In this situation, you gather all the elements that interest you. In this kind of cinema, I consider the most important thing to find your character, the best person for your film. The casting is the most important in this. And the actors just have to be themselves somehow. Of course, you give them some clues, but you orient them very gently. You create a situation where you can observe reality in a different way than when you are intrusive, you direct, and you tell everything. I find this is my way. Of course, it’s not only my way. There are other directors who like to do that. But for me, it took a long time to understand that I like to work this way. In other words, I think there are some directors who like to create reality, but for me, reality is richer and more interesting than what I could create. So, I like to put elements of reality together, but not to create it or direct it. To observe reality, that’s what I’m most interested in.

Q: Maybe that is why, even when you make a fiction film, such as Natural Light, you prefer to work with non-professional actors, who are not so demanding; they don’t ask you about their characters’ backstories or motivations.

A: Absolutely, yes. When we did this film with Kurtág, I was not interested in his motivations. I believe the most interesting thing is to get the feeling that something is deeply going on inside somebody. And this feeling already tells a lot. I feel that, when you want to tell exactly what’s going on, when you want to understand exactly everything, it can become an illustration. You can create, I think, a deeper meaning when you leave certain things in the shadow. So, somehow, I’m really interested in showing this shadow. And I believe that, by directing like this, you create a shadow. You see somebody who is very interesting, but you don’t catch exactly everything; you don’t need all the information. You leave some things vague; there is still some ambiguity in the air. I think reality is ambiguity. In my imagination, reality is full of different, even opposite things. For example, beauty is very close to ugliness. I just think about myself. I can be ugly in the morning, and I can be beautiful in another part of the day. And I believe these go together in reality. If you just show that you are beautiful or ugly, that becomes only a distorted way of showing reality. And I think this ambiguity that we are all this at the same time, being gentle and being aggressive, is also a part of our personality. In reality, they’re together. This ambiguity may be for me the most interesting to observe and to capture on film. And not to tell: “OK, now you have to be aggressive; now you have to be gentle”.

Q: As the title of your latest film suggests, it is composed of various fragments gravitating around György Kurtág’s life and his music. How did you develop this concept?

A: First of all, it was clear that Kurtág’s face is the most interesting. However, I understood that you also need to breathe in the film. You cannot just watch a person in close-up or his hands in extreme close-up; it becomes too much. So, it was clear that you have to go out of this closeness, because this concentration is also suffocating. He’s so concentrated sometimes, so full of energy, that you need to go out of this to do something else. I had this idea to also go to landscapes. I’m always interested in landscapes. So, for me, it’s faces and landscapes. I wanted to find a way not to illustrate Kurtág, but, through landscapes, to go into his head. What we decided to do was to show different landscapes from the sea, the rivers, the mountains, and so on. However, this can easily go into a direction where you feel that this is illustrating his thoughts. There is a thin line. But I believe we managed. The idea was not to illustrate it, but to somehow enter into his fantasy or into his brain. So, we always have a kind of reason why we go out of this very close picture of his face. We visit musicians in the world who are close to him. We go to Iceland, which is a very different landscape, where we visit Víkingur Ólafsson, the famous Icelandic pianist, or we go to Paris, where he has the premiere of his opera, Fin de partie, or we go to Lugoj and Băile Herculane, where he grew up, and he spent his childhood, which is an amazingly important part of his life. Or we visit the archive of the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Switzerland, where scores, letters, and diaries of the most important composers of the 20^th and 21^st century are kept underground in an amazing bunker under Basel. Scores by Igor Stravinsky, Witold Lutosławski, György Ligeti, and now György Kurtág are kept there. I think that, also from a visual point of view, that was an important element in the film. There’s a lady from Switzerland coming to Budapest to visit Kurtág every half a year with a little suitcase; she collects all the scores written in the previous six months, and she takes them by airplane back to Basel, putting them underground to be kept it in this bunker. This said something about eternity, about what’s the goal of eternity, if it makes sense to keep this forever, or what does it mean to live so long. I mean, it brings a lot of questions. Of course, death plays an important role in the film, because you see an almost 100-year-old person, who has meanwhile turned 100, and you realize he’s one step not in this world already, he’s somewhere else, in a different world, a different time and space. Death is always around somehow, but this is not scary for him. It is so interesting to see a person who is not scared of death, but is constantly thinking about it. We also needed to create a story. First of all, every film, I think, needs drama; it needs a story somehow. During the editing, it became clear what this story should be. The editing was the most creative part of making the film.

Q: How long did the shooting take, and then the editing?

A: The shooting was four years. In total, we shot 300 hours with Kurtág. And we edited these two hours in six months from the 300 we had, which was an amazingly stressful part. I worked with Nicolas Rumpl, an editor from Belgium, with whom I also worked on my previous films. Editing was a fantastic, but also very stressful period. And we also invited Răzvan Rădulescu, who’s a kind of mentor and friend of mine, to work with us during the editing. His advice was very important. He came to Budapest, where we were editing, and he spent one whole week with us. Then, he also gave comments later on in the different stages of the editing process. It was a very intense week with him sitting and going through all the material. He gave us very courageous and very special advice about what to do and how to make the film different.

Q: He is also a melomaniac, and he studied opera directing at the National Music Academy in Bucharest.

A: Yes, he is a very special person. I met him at the TorinoFilmLab. I was there with my first feature film, Natural Light. Then, we started to work together. I visited him in Bucharest several times. With my new film, which is still in pre-production, I contacted him, and we worked on that also, both in Bucharest and in Berlin. And yes, he’s a huge music fan, as well as a musician and an instrument maker. He is now making harpsichords, which are amazing instruments, on his own, with his own hands. He has this very special skill. I’m also playing the alto recorder, and when I came to Bucharest, we played together during the breaks of the writing process. He was on the harpsichord and me on the alto recorder. We played some Baroque music. So, yes, Răzvan is a fantastic person, and he was a very big help in this editing, too. I’m very grateful to him.

As I said before, it was important to create a story, and it became clear during the editing that this story should be about Kurtág’s closest family. So, we based the film on the connection, the relationship with his mother, his wife, and his son. These were the three people who were the most important somehow, throughout his life. Somehow, everything started in Lugoj when, as a child, he was playing four-hand piano pieces with his mother. And I think it’s a very powerful story. So, they were playing Beethoven, Schubert, etc., on the piano with four hands. But the most important thing in this musical moment was that, by chance, they touched each other’s elbows. So somehow, for the child Kurtág, music was a way to contact or to touch his mother. In a way, his whole universe comes from this exact moment. With music, you can touch a person. In other words, music is an instrument to touch somebody else. And I think this is art for him. It’s a way to connect to another person. And it’s so powerful that he wrote many pieces for four-hand piano, which were aimed to be played together by him and his wife. He and Márta. And these pieces are written so that during the playing of the piece, you have to cross hands, which is really illogical. But he wrote the pieces in a way that you have to really touch the other while playing them. He did the exact same thing; music was a way for him to connect to his wife as well. So, I used this line of connecting to the other person, as well as the isolation from the world, because he’s also a very isolated person. In what we consider normal verbal situations, it’s very difficult for him to connect. It was so interesting that we shot this film for four years, but Kurtág never asked me my name. He never asked things like: “Who are you? Do you have children? What do you do in your free time?” We never drank coffee together. But we spent so many hours together. I was sitting behind him for hours and hours, with a lot of patience. But still, somehow, for me, these four years were not impersonal. He was not being rude to me because he never asked me any question. I asked him so many questions, but he never asked me back. I didn’t feel that this is something bad. Because, still, when we arrived, we always shook hands. But, in this shaking of hands, in this touching of the two hands, it was clear that he said: “It’s good that you are here”. Or: “I trust you”. And somehow that was enough. So, he is a person who tries to touch the other person and to tell everything with that. And music is for him the best way to touch another person. Maybe this is where the film talks about more than just a composer. It talks about – at least I hope it talks about – a very human desire to connect, to touch the other person. And creation is a way to touch another person, or to understand the other person.

Q: When you started making the film, György Kurtág was already 95 years old. Was he always open to collaboration? Did he have any suggestions or objections to your directing process?

A: No, it was very surprising, but he never gave any comments. He never asked when the film would be ready or what should be included in the film. I think the reason for that was that I’m not from the music world. His power, his being a master, has limits; it’s restricted to the music world. It was so interesting to see all these big stars from all over the world, such as Pierre-Laurent Aimard, the French pianist, and many others, becoming his little students; each of them wanted to be the best student, perfect in everything. They were anxious to receive good words from Kurtág; they were waiting for his acceptance. But I was not part of this, so I was very free in that respect. And it was unusual for him. In a way, this saved me from these comments, which of course I also wanted to avoid. It was very clear, even when editing, that we don’t show him the film until it’s ready. I knew that it was dangerous to ask for his advice, so I did not. We showed him the film only when it was totally ready. Surely, I knew that it was still a very difficult moment. I had this burden on my back for all these years.

Q: Did you show him the film before his 100^th birthday? I know that the Hungarian premiere of the film was on 19 February 2026, when he turned 100.

A: Yes, we showed him the film before his birthday, of course.

Q: How did he receive it?

A: It was a very interesting screening. We showed him the film on a big screen. There were he and his son, György Kurtág Jr., László Gőz, and the producer of the film, Julianna Ugrin. And we also invited Ildikó Enyedi, the film director. I like to ask for her opinion. At the end of the screening, there was a huge silence, for three or five minutes, I don’t know, maybe more, but it seemed to me like an eternal silence. And then the only thing that happened in the end was that he held my hand and shook it. It was a silent moment; he didn’t say anything, but he gave his approval. That handshake meant that it was OK, it was good.

Q: What would you have done if he had told you the film was bad and you needed to change it? Would you have done it?

A: I don’t know. I know that this was a real possibility. I think he liked that we were really patient. We took a lot of time. We were patient but also persistent. And I believe this is something he really likes, that somebody is patient and persistent, doing everything to bring the best, to produce the perfect thing. And we did that somehow. We wanted to bring the perfect thing. However, it could still not work. It was still a possibility. But I think we were lucky.

Q: As you mentioned, some of the filming locations of your documentary are in Romania, in Băile Herculane, the spa that György Kurtág visited as a child together with his mother, and Lugoj, the city where he was born. Did he accompany you on these filming trips?

A: No, he didn’t.

Q: I wonder what his current feelings about Romania, his native country, and those places where he lived for the first 19 years of his life are. Because in the film, he recalls some pleasant memories, mostly involving his mother, and other not-so-pleasant ones. And I have to say that I was very impressed that he can still remember the lyrics and sing a traditional Romanian Christmas carol, “O, ce veste minunată” (“Oh, What Wonderful News”)…

A: It’s a complex question. What is very interesting is that he left Romania in 1945, at the end of the war, and came to Budapest. He wanted to apply to the Music Academy to become a composer and a pianist. And he wanted to study with Béla Bartók; that was his biggest wish. He arrived in Budapest in September 1945. That year, because of the war, the entrance exams for the Music Academy were later. And it was exactly September 1945 when Bartók died, so Kurtág only saw the black flag. What is interesting is that he arrived at the same time as György Ligeti. They met in the faculty corridors. They both wanted to study with Bartók. So, Kurtág left Romania in 1945 and only went back in 1995. He never came back for 50 years, which is very interesting. It tells a lot about him, and it tells a lot about that world that was lost for the Jewish community, basically everywhere, but also in Lugoj, where there was a very large and rich Jewish community. What is also very interesting is that the Jewish community survived in Lugoj. Luckily, the Jews of Lugoj were not deported. As we know, Hungarian Jews were deported, and most of them died in the concentration camps. But the Jews of Lugoj were saved. However, all of them, the whole community, together with their rabbi, left for Palestine after the war. Basically, nobody stayed. And this whole culture died. So, in a way, for him, I think the end of the war and of the Holocaust, together with the dissolution of this culture in which he grew up, became a memory. I believe he didn’t go back to Lugoj because it was not there anymore. It was a different world; it was not connected to that childhood that he knew, because those Jewish people, his community, were not there anymore. I think that, for him, this childhood is a very important part of his life, and he recalls it in a very nostalgic and very beautiful way, but this nostalgia is somehow ambiguous, because that world is not there anymore. You cannot go back to the past. There is a tragedy always there. There’s something beautiful, but it’s over. You cannot return to that; it doesn’t exist anymore. And I think this is something we can also relate to. Maybe we don’t realize it, because we didn’t live through such a radical situation as the Holocaust. Perhaps many of us in Eastern Europe had a similar feeling, that everything changes completely very rapidly, after the revolutions in 1989. A feeling that something is lost forever. There was a world, which was bad or good, it was both, but it’s now lost, you cannot go back to it. It’s something that is now completely in the past. And I believe that’s actually happening all the time to us. We don’t realize it, but in a way, we cannot go back to the past; we cannot live in the past. I think he understood, and he learned from his life that. And this was the most interesting to observe in the film, that he’s a person living in the present; he’s not trying to repeat himself, to look for things in the past, he’s living in the present. Of course, there are some scraps, some little things coming from the past, but there are just remains, not more than that. And there’s a huge fog behind you. You are here, in the present time and space, but everything else is a big fog in which you can look back for certain moments, but they’re only remains of something lost. You cannot really touch that anymore. His musical world is really powerful, as it touches this kind of feeling of loss, which is something very human. This also raises questions about the meaning of our life today, about why we live. And it’s nostalgic, but never sentimental. It’s a very authentic nostalgia. As for “O, ce veste minunată”, it is the most beautiful melody; I’ve never heard such a beautiful melody, so gentle and fine. However, for him, this melody is connected to a very brutal memory, about being beaten up. He remembers that his colleagues beat him up during or before rehearsing this piece in school before Christmas.

Q: The other kids felt that he, as a Jewish kid, should not have sung a Christian carol…

A: Yes, absolutely. It’s so interesting that the beauty and this horror, this aggressiveness, are together. And they’re connected; it’s at the same time a very beautiful memory and a horrific, brutal one. In his reality, you cannot separate them; they’re together. And this is very powerful for me. He wrote a piece about this, called “Scraps of a Colinda Melody”, which is also in the film. The piece is very interesting. He starts the melody as if he tries to remember, then there’s a big pause, as if he forgets, he cannot remember how to continue. And then, he restarts the melody again, but again forgets it, and there’s another big pause in the piece. It’s like somebody is trying to remember, but is not able to remember, and at the same time, he’s trying to forget, but is not able to forget. These two things happen at the same time. You cannot either remember or forget. I think for him, his childhood in Lugoj is like this, something to remember, but something to forget at the same time; you want to remember, but you also want to forget. You cannot remember everything, and you cannot forget everything either. So, his relation to Romania is such a thing.

Q: As you talked about your collaboration with Răzvan Rădulescu, I would like to know what your relation with Romanian cinema is.
A: For me, Romanian cinema in the 2000s was an example of good cinema. Not only for me, but also for many filmmakers, I believe. That was the moment when I started film school, so I started to make films. At that time, I think it was the most up-to-date cinema that I saw. I liked Mungiu, Puiu, and, of course, Răzvan Rădulescu. Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective was one of my favourite films. But also later on, for example, Puiu’s Sieranevada is for me one of the most powerful films of the last ten years; I find it totally exceptional. Since I watched their first films, I have followed these directors. Of course, I don’t know the whole Romanian cinema. But this New Romanian Wave or New Romanian Cinema reached me and touched me so deeply. There is, surely, also Radu Jude, but I met him later, after I finished film school in 2009. I started with Puiu’s Death of Mister Lăzărescu, and then Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which was a huge hit, and I remember being so into that film. But somehow, I think that Puiu and Porumboiu touched me more. I felt that there’s a great freedom in that cinema. Compared to it, I believe Hungarian cinema is too serious or too dark. And what is interesting is that Romanian cinema is also very dark, but it’s really pleasant to watch; you can even laugh and enjoy it. And for me now, to enjoy the film, to laugh and to cry while watching it is something more important. For example, I really admire Béla Tarr, but I think it’s good for Hungarian cinema to move away from that. Or at least, I would not like to do the same. Also, with my next film, I want to go a bit into lighter direction. Of course, while keeping the darkness. For me, Romanian cinema has this very fine balance between darkness and lightness. Certainly, it comes from you, from the Romanian people. I think Hungarian people are somehow more melancholic. But it’s good to move away from this melancholy, which can be a bit tiring. So, it’s a relief to move away from it.