Home movies are private moments captured for private remembrance; their lifetime is uncertain. But to Budapest-based filmmaker Péter Forgács, home movies are charged artifacts that give us vivid glimpses of the past. Forgács has gathered home movies from citizens of Budapest and refashioned them into elegiac portraits of a place and its inhabitants. These lyrical reconstructions typically look at the now-vanished bourgeois culture of the 1930s and '40s and function as poetic ethnography scored to buoyant music. Two episodes from the Private Hungary series have been selected: Father and His Three Sons-The Bartos Family (1988, 60 mins) follows Zoltán Bartos and his family across a span of thirty years. Here, the little ceremonies of family life are enveloped by a wistful calm, denying the political upheavals occurring throughout Europe. In Dusi and Jenö (1989, 45 mins), Jenö, a bank clerk with a filmmaker's eye, brings the city into sharp focus. While he and his wife Dusi cavort, Budapest stands mutely by, splendid one year, ravaged by war the next. There is lingering drama here, the drama of great histories revealed and simple lives re-enacted. --Steve Seid