On Body and Soul

On Body and Soul is set in a Budapest abattoir, where a withdrawn finance director and a new quality inspector with a rigid, precise manner barely speak. During a workplace investigation they learn that each night they dream the same dream, meeting as a stag and a doe in a snowy forest. The discovery draws them toward one another, and the film follows their awkward, fearful attempts to close the gap between that nightly intimacy and their guarded waking selves.

The shared dream gives form to unconscious desire and to the psychic isolation that keeps two people apart despite their longing. The contrast between the frozen tenderness of the forest and the harsh, bodily world of the slaughterhouse sets soul against flesh and asks what it costs to let another person in. It won the Golden Bear at the 2017 Berlin International Film Festival.