RED PSALM

Hungary, 1890. A group of peasants working on a country estate go on strike. The administrator refuses to consider their demands and tries to bribe them with grain. When the peasants refuse his offer, he sets the crops on fire – thus signing his own death sentence. A succession of authorities come to the estate in order to quash the uprising. But the rebels continue to demand their rights. With precisely choreographed crowd scenes, traditional songs, and powerful symbolic imagery, Jancsó stages his film, which is loosely based on the 19th-century Hungarian revolutionary movements, as a poetic parable.