"Hol volt, hol nem volt-Once there was, and there wasn't": it's the line with which all Hungarian fairy tales begin. So Gyula Gazdag is in keeping with tradition in mixing bleak realism with poetic fantasy to tell an allegory of identity, with a surprising twist. Gazdag starts from a point of real absurdity: a law, apparently still in existence, which holds that an illegitimate child must have a father on record, even if that father is a fictitious one. Andris, a boy born out of a night of love inspired by The Magic Flute, is being raised by his mother. When the time comes to register a "father," the mother casually uses the registrar's own family name. Years later, now orphaned, the boy sets out on a search for his father. Meanwhile, the clerk, giddy from creating one too many paternity files, runs rebelliously amok, burning his papers and bidding the system adieu. The two wanderers meet, and are joined by a third, a nurse who has also given up on it all. But what started for Andris as a search for identity becomes, for all three, the desperate pursuit of a way out of the imprisonment of identity, and their journey takes on a fairy tale quality. Images from a dream turn up in "real life" with extraordinary visual power. A Hungarian Fairy Tale, shot luminously in black-and-white by Gazdag's frequent collaborator Elemér Ragályi, combines the economy of Gazdag's celebrated short films with the delirious experimentation of a feature like Singing on the Treadmill.