A Hungarian Fairy Tale (1987): Cast & Plot

In Budapest, a young boy named Andris comes into the world under mysterious circumstances. His mother, Maria, is drawn to a mysterious stranger during a performance of the opera The Magic Flute, and though the encounter leads to Andris’s conception, the stranger vanishes, leaving Andris with no knowledge of his true father. A central challenge of Andris’s life is the law that a boy should carry his father’s name, even if the father is unknown, to avoid the stigma of illegitimacy. When Maria tries to register Andris, the bureaucracy assigns him a fictitious father, and on Andris’s birth certificate she notes the name of the bureaucrat she’s dealing with—Antal Orban—in effect creating a makeshift, illegitimate lineage.