Kornél Mundruczó

Early life

He earned a diploma from Hungary’s Academy of Film and Drama in 1998 as an actor, then in 2003 as a film and television director. In that same year, he founded Proton Cinema Ltd., dedicated to film production, along with Viktória Petrányi, a constant co-creator and collaborator in his work and writing since the academy.

Career

His first full-length feature This I wish and nothing more won, among other prizes, the award for best first film at the 31st Hungarian Film Week, as well as its Students’ Jury and Directors’ Guild Awards. He directed his short film Afta shortly after leaving school. It went on to win numerous international awards. Pleasant Days, his second feature film, was awarded the Silver Leopard in Locarno in 2002.

In 2003, he won the Cinéfondation Program’s artistic grant, within the framework of the Cannes International Film Festival, where he developed the screenplay of the film Delta, together with Yvette Bíró in Paris.

He has been a member of the European Film Academy since 2004.

In 2005, he won the Nipkow Program’s artistic grant to participate for three months in courses and consultations for talented screenwriters and directors in Berlin.

Afterward, his fourth and fifth feature-length films were entered in the official competition of Cannes Film Festival: Delta in 2008, and Tender Son in 2010. The former won the FIPRESCI Award.

In 2014, Kornél Mundruczó’s film White God – the fourth of his six full-length films to date, which was invited to Cannes Film Festival and made with the support of Eurimages, the European Council’s film foundation and the Hungarian National Film Foundation – won the main prize of the Un Certain Regard program at the 67th Cannes Film Festival. Also, the film’s canine star won the Palm Dog Award for best performance by a dog.

Mundruczó has worked in theatre since 2003, first in Hungary and then in theatres abroad such as the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, the TR Warszawa, the Schauspielhaus Zürich and the Vlaamse Opera. He is most keen to begin new projects where he finds the subject, collaborators and venue inspiring. During the creative process, he strives to create a team. For new projects, he very often casts the same actors, who work with him as creative partners. It is with them that he devises the productions. After freelancing with more or less the same group of people for several years, in 2009, he founded Proton Theatre, his independent theatre company, with producer Dóra Büki.

Proton Theatre is a virtual artistic company organised around the director’s independent productions. Besides preserving maximum artistic freedom, their goal is to ensure a professional structure for their independently produced theatre plays and projects. Chiefly, their performances are realized as international co-productions, and their frequent collaborators include the Wiener Festwochen, HAU Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin, Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, Trafó House of Contemporary Arts in Budapest and Hellerau in Dresden. Currently, the ensemble has nine performances in repertoire. Productions directed by the artistic leader include The Ice (2006); Frankenstein-project (2007), which inspired his later film Tender Son; Hard to be a God (2010); Disgrace (2012), based on the post-apartheid novel by Nobel Prize-winner J. M. Coetzee and, in turn, inspiring his film White God; Dementia (2014); Winterreise (2015); and Imitation of Life (2016). In addition, the Proton Theatre wishes to provide space for the realisation of company members’ ideas. In this spirit, they created the following performances: Last (2014), directed by Roland Rába; and 1 link (2015), directed by Gergely Bánki.

Over these years, the Proton Theatre’s performances have toured to more than 70 festivals until 2016, including the Festival d’Avignon, the Adelaide Festival, the Singapore International Festival, the Seoul Bo:m Festival and the Zürcher Theater Spektakel.