The 28th annual Stony Brook Film Festival, put on by its namesake university, took place last weekend in Stony Brook, New York. The festival showcases independent feature and short films. This year, a total of 36 pictures were played from 26 different countries.
Among the ones distinguished with an award was
the 2022 crime drama The Grandson (Az unoka) by Hungarian director Kristóf Deák, which won in the Audience Choice Award for Best Feature category.
The plot of the film revolves around a young man named Rudi (played by Gergely Blahó), who finds out about his beloved grandfather being scammed out of a lot of money by people claiming his grandson got into a car accident and needs to pay for damages. With the police unable to track down the perpetrators, Rudi decides to embark on his own journey to find them.
The film, despite being popular among the festival audience in New York and thus getting a great accolade, performed underwhelmingly in Hungarian cinemas upon its release. It was released to theatres on 6 January 2022, and a total of 39,975 tickets were sold in its original run, generating only about 64.1 million HUF ($182,000) in box office revenue. This is against an estimated production budget of around 700 million HUF ($1.98 million).
This is not the first time director Kristóf Deák comes back from the United States with a prestigious film award. In 2017, he won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film for his 2016 short titled Sing (its original Hungarian title is Mindenki, which actually translates to ‘Everyone’).
His latest film, The Grandson, in addition to its aforementioned win at Stony Brook, was also awarded with the Best Thriller title at the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival, as well as the audience award at the Hungarian Film Festival of Los Angeles.
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