Gaál's film, which won the prestigious Jury Prize at Cannes, takes place in a remote encampment in the vast Hungarian plain where a young man, Gabór, has come to learn the art of falconry. He becomes enthralled and then enmeshed with the falconer, Lilik, a master of his craft who has achieved complete and unerring control over the birds he views in a mythic light, "like small Teuton knights." But Lilik is also master of Terèz, his lover, and, as Gabór comes to see, of the entire small society around him. It is not hard to see a metaphor for totalitarianism here, but The Falcons builds its atmosphere of unease and entrapment through the most exquisite use of visuals and rhythms, so that there is nothing crudely allegorical about it. In its precise observation of the world of the falcons, a world of flight and cold beauty, Gaál creates a film that, as he said, "does not speak about birds but about men."