Writer/Director Zsolt Kézdi-Kovács was one of the founders of the important Béla Balázs Studio for young filmmakers of the sixties and was for several years assistant to Miklós Jancsó before making his own, highly acclaimed features. The Right to Hope is his sixth film; others include When Joseph Returns (1975), The Nice Neighbor (1979), and his newest film Forbidden Relations (1982).

In a ramshackle, turn-of-the-century house in contemporary Budapest, 12-year-old Tamás lives with his aged grandfather while his parents get divorced. When the old man dies suddenly, Tamás is given to an unsympathetic aunt and together they occupy the grandfather's flat in the converted building. Left alone for long periods of time, the boy is mercilessly harassed by a crazy neighbor (played by László Szabó, the “nice neighbor” of the previous film), who had probably tormented the grandfather to death. In this film, as in the drama When Joseph Returns and the shrewd comedy The Nice Neighbor, Kézdi-Kovács scrutinizes the moral issues that arise when people are forced by circumstance to live together. The aunt succeeds only partially in warming up to her charge; like the wife and mother-in-law in When Joseph Returns, they reach what the director calls “a silent living side by side.” In The Right to Hope, Kézdi-Kovács observes through the eyes of this bright child the fact that “moral norms have