Surreal. That seems to be the common consensus about this film. It's the second directorial effort of Hungarian filmmaker György Pálfi, following his acclaimed debut, Hukkle. Says the filmmaker:

"I would like to create a lasting, personal-authorial film, the story of a man tortured by eternal dilemmas, not actual ones. Past exists only in memories."

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What's the Movie About: Taxidermia is: Three stories. Three ages. Three men. Grandfather, father, son. One is an orderly, one is a leading sportsman, and one is a master taxidermist. One desires love, the other success, and the third immortality.

The grandfather lives in his fantasies and on cold winter evenings he warms up his freezing little shed with his feverish dreams. Nothing can stop his fertile imagination. The father stuffs himself. For four years he was the first in his section in the Confectionary Industry. He is still unbeatable in chocolate wafers with an individual record of 2.98 (just as a comparison Igor Vostongonoff was the European champion in Sophia with 3.21.). The son stuffs animals. He was born one and a half kilos. Now he has less than one and a half minutes left. He goes in for something that nobody has ever imagined before.

Director's conception


It is a story of a family, although it is not a novel, but a film. It is still not a family film, but an authorial one. The literary definition refers to the kind of story of a family which Thomas Mann created: three generations - grandfather, father, son - integrate the world. The grandfather bases the family, he starts the world (progenitor). His son, the father takes the family to the top so that the son would waste the values obtained with difficulties while he puts down the past, makes it a whole, raises it to a level of different value. In Taxidermia the son's scale of values, this very strong subjectivity turns the classical story of a family upside down and adds some wonders to it making the stories straight with the not everyday position of the perspective.

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I found an important sentence in a short story: 'Tell something important about yourself.' I do not need to tell about myself, but about things of the world important for me. I found a world in Lajos Parti Nagy's short stories which could be mine as well. His two short stories became the basis of this story of a family. I attached the story of the third generation and the narrator's position myself to the script.

I think of the story of three generations as a sketch film. It is a sketch film made by one author. That is why it will be integrated. In the same time it does not adhere to the rules of a sketch film, for it makes a whole 'filmful' story. Three flashes from three persons' life. The gaps between the stories are filled by the audience's guided imagination.

(YouTube video of Taxidermia, see it below)

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Tell something important about yourself - there, before the moment of death, before the terrible knife strikes the protagonist realizes that he has something to tell, and his stories belong to his identity and his notions about what man is. His body, this perfect work of art withdrawn to itself is a whole only together with his stories. And while he stiffens to a sculpture everything ever marked by a name vanishes, only an archaical torso remains of him, made from special material stiffened into sculture, without a name.

I would like to create a lasting, personal-authorial film, the story of a man tortured by eternal dilemmas, not actual ones. Past exists only in memories. It becomes a story only in Lajos Balathony's interpretation. And why cannot it be true? Why could not the world be like this? Why cannot the fertile human imagination toy with the facts of history, personal fates, details of lifestyles? Maybe this is the common border of things really happened and truth.

[ official movie website ] [ Director profile ]

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