Ágnes Kocsis’s  Pál Adrienn, a Hungarian/Austrian/French/Dutch co-production, was selected the winner of the Fipresci Prize from the Certain Regard line-up at the 2010 Cannes festival.

 

The international press  wrote on Pál Adrienn ...

"Four years ago, Fresh Air made Ágnès Kocsis one of the most promising directors of the new generation of Hungarian Cinema," writes Vitor Pinto for Cineuropa. "The accurate and analytical perspective that characterised her debut film can be found again in her latest directorial feature, Adrienn Pál," the "story about the idealisation of the past, one of those idealisations that usually emerge in difficult times when one is faced with a suffocating reality from which there seems no escape. In the case of Piroska  (Eva Gábor),  this idealisation crystallises into one person, Adrienn Pál, her best friend at primary school, with whom she lost touch over 20 years ago."

Howard Feinstein for Screen: "An enormous nurse in the terminal ward of a Budapest hospital who spends her working hours staring blankly at a wall of cardiac monitors, assisting doctors when they try to revive those whose hearts give out and changing adult diapers, she escapes the monotony of her job, the overexposure to death, and a deprecating husband at home by retreating into her childhood. More than anything, she retreats from loneliness."

"Kocsis's camera relentlessly follows Piroska in her daily rituals at home and at work, and the effect is (one hopes, purposefully) quite deadening," writes Peter Brunette in the Hollywood Reporter. "Even the banging of the clunky wooden shoes she wears in the hospital is used by second-time director Kocsis to suggest the harsh, empty repetitiveness of her life.... Happily for those who do buy tickets to see this film, it ends on the faintest of hopeful notes."