Top 100 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2017: # 89. (Tie) Gyorgy Palfi’s For Ever & His Master’s Voice

For Ever & His Master’s Voice

Director: Gyorgy Palfi
Writer: György Pálfi, Zsofia Ruttkay (For Ever)
Writer: György Pálfi, Zsofia Ruttkay, Navy V. Gergo (His Master’s Voice).

Expect Gyorgy Palfi to be one of several auteurs in 2017 to debut two new features. Though he’s perhaps still best known for his 2006 sophomore feature, Taxidermia, he won Best Director at Karlovy Vary in 2014 for the equally bizarre Free Fall (which we hopes picks up US distribution someday). In mid-2015, Palfi opened an Indiegogo for post-production of his latest, Mindörökké (For Ever), based on a novel by Sandor Tar about a post-apocalyptic Hungarian-Ukrainian village. Knowing Pálfi’s particular visual flair and frequency of bizarre narratives, we can’t wait to see what he has in store for us.
And then there’s his long gestating project His Master’s Voice (previously known as The Voice) based on a novel by Stanislaw Lem (who wrote the novels which would be adapted into items like Tarkovsky’s Solaris and German’s Hard to Be a God). Considered one of Lem’s three best known novels, it concerns a group of scientists trying to decode an extraterrestrial transmission. The project filmed in Ottawa, Canada.

Cast: Julia Ubrankovics, Tamas Polgar, Attila Menszator-Heresz (For Ever) –

Cast: Kate Vernon, Marshall Williams, Benz Antoine (His Master’s Voice).

Production Co./Producer(s): KMH Film, Sunpunks Entertainment (For Ever).

Production Co./Producer(s): KMH Film, Quiet Revolution Pictures (His Master’s Voice).

U.S. Distributor: Rights available (both).

Release Date: Palfi’s debut Hukkle won him Best New Director out of San Sebastian, while Taxidermia played in Un Certain Regard in 2006, and Free Fall won him Best Director at Karlovy Vary in 2014. We’re expecting both of his new projects to pop up somewhere—the bigger budget His Master’s Voice could be a return a Cannes for Palfi, while For Ever might be a return to Karlovy Vary or Locarno since it didn’t pop up in 2016.

[related]Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2017[/related]