Benedek Fliegauf

In 2003, Fliegauf directed his first feature film. Balanced between comedy and drama, Rengeteg tells stories about the lives of young Hungarians living in Budapest. The film was shot in digital, with amateur actors in leading roles. Rengeteg was invited to the International Forum of New Cinema of the Berlin International Film Festival and was awarded there with the Wolfgang Staudte Prize. According to the German Filmdienst magazine, the elliptical drama and documentary style of Rengeteg resembled the works of the Danish Dogme movement. Fliegauf himself stated, however, that he had applied the aesthetics of the Budapest School of the 1970s following the work of his famous fellow countryman Béla Tarr.

2004 saw Fliegauf achieve great international success with his second feature film, Dealer, which was also invited to the International Forum of New Cinema at the Berlin International Film Festival. This psychological profile of an emotionally devastated young drug dealer (played by Felícián Keresztes) who ends up killing himself was shot, like many of his other films, without subsidies, with a small team, mobile digital cameras, amateur actors and the help of friends and social networks. Filmdienst praised Fliegauf for his dark, minimalist episodic film, listing him among the most promising young directors besides György Pálfi. Again, his work was compared to the cinema of Béla Tarr and Andrei Tarkovsky, although Fliegauf himself pointed to David Lynch and Sergio Leone as sources of inspiration. The Tageszeitung also praised Dealer as difficult to sit through, but a must-see film. Dealer won several prizes at international festivals, including the Best Director Award at the Festival Internacional de Cine de Mar del Plata and the Hungarian Film Week.