The Round-Up

The Round-Up (Szegénylegények, 1966) — watch this Hungarian historical drama online on iFILM, directed by Miklós Jancsó and starring Latinovits Zoltán and János Görbe.

Hungary, 1849. The Kossuth uprising crushed, Austrian authorities sweep hundreds of suspects — peasants, outlaws, ex-rebels — into a bleak fortified compound on the open plain. The partisans of Sándor Rózsa are still out there, but no one knows which prisoner is which. So the administration works through informers, false promises of amnesty, and calculated pressure: set prisoner against prisoner until somebody talks.

Jancsó builds the film almost entirely in long, unbroken tracking shots across sun-bleached courtyards, the figures moving in slow, near-ritual patterns. There are no heroes and no last-minute exits. The film is less about 1849 than about every institution that has ever ground people down by making them complicit in their own destruction. Watch The Round-Up (1966) on iFILM.