The End

“Nothing approximates death as closely as photography.” In a small town in Communist Hungary, András Szabad’s childhood comes to an abrupt end with his father’s return from prison and the death of his loving mother. In search of new beginnings, András moves with his father to Budapest, where he discovers a passion for photography, for uncovering the invisible through the visible, and for fixing matter and memory so as to ward them against the inevitability of time. An unorthodox first encounter brings András together with Éva, and soon they become entangled in a psychosexual relationship of consuming passion, but also of bitterness and resentment. Unspooling like a roll of film, The End captures in frames of language the faces and places of András’ memory, which together form a fever-dream collage of an artist’s psyche. With electric precision and fluid dialogue, Attila Bartis weaves a sprawling family saga with 20th-century European history and offers an unflinchingly lucid yet boundlessly compassionate account of psychological devastation under authoritarianism.