KOJOT

It starts like a Bud Spencer film. A gigantic man defends his land against the superior forces of policemen and bailiffs. Such a thoroughly choreographed fight scene has surely never been seen in Hungarian cinema. Then director Márk Kostyál dials it down for a bit. A young middle-class couple: Misi is a banker, Eszter a teacher. They want to extend the grandfather’s humble house in the provinces, but local big wig Szojka has other ideas. First, he attempts to buy Misi’s loyalty and when that fails, he resorts to brutal violence. The local authorities, judges and policemen are already all in his pocket.

A genre film about an omnipotent puppet-master who to more than just a few viewers bears similarities to the Orbán crony Lörinc Mészaros, a man who in the past years enriched himself to an incredible extent. Accordingly, producer Gabor Kalomista withdrew the film from the Hungarian Film Week in March 2017. COYOTE started virtually without any advertising and achieved an audience of only 1,667 on the first weekend. Yet because film reviewers hyped the film, the production company uploaded it for free to YouTube where it was watched by over 120,000 users. In February 2018, the film made its way back to cinemas. JT