Work in progress | Feature, 4K digital, 120 min drama-thriller
The Beauty Queen
Writer: Máté Fazekas
Director: Áron Mátyássy
Producer: Julianna Ugrin
1985, Budapest, Hungary. The first beauty contest after a 52-year hiatus in the Hungarian People's Republic. The event's reception in the still socialist society was quite controversial: there were worries about the eruption of the communist moral but at the same time everyone was eager to see young girls walking in bikinis.
One of these girls CSILLA (16), from the countryside doesn’t have big ambitions, she just wants some change in her life in the sleepy town at the Lake Balaton. But unexpectedly she makes into the final round which results conflict in her family as Csilla didn’t told her autocratic father entering the contest earlier. She can rely only on her mother who becomes her strongest ally.
Csilla’s life turns upside down when she wins and becomes Miss Hungary. She tries to stay the same modest village girl but everyone sees only the beauty queen in her. Slowly it transforms her inside: despite her age she recognises that her life could be much more different.
Soon Csilla realizes that there is nothing behind all the promises and compliments she’s got. She feels to be left alone.
She got into an affair with a married man who doesn’t want to make their relationship official. Csilla feels that she has nowhere to go. In her desperation she packs all her stuff to leave but her father threatens her. Csilla wants to fight back so she takes a huge number of pills to scare him… the attempt turns into a real suicide. Miss Hungary is dead.
Whose fault was it? What went wrong? Whose victim was the most attractive Hungarian girl in a changing Europe at the end of the 80’s?