Kárpáti Péter és barátai // Rühes kutya

Confessing is a communal experience. It’s not just a way for the guilty to unburden their soul — it’s also a way to drag listeners into the swamp of sin.

“Our starting point was the dark and murky world of folktales from Karcsa (collected by Géza Nagy). An ethnographic Galápagos: in this isolated region of Bodrogköz, traditional stories evolved in strange and unfamiliar directions over the centuries.

The world of these tales is visionary and psychologically profound, and every twist and turn has enormous dramatic weight.

I kept only a sentence or two from the originals. Our time and place is today’s worn-down, rural Hungary. We recite fragmented, self-contradictory confessions — stories so horrific that they couldn't possibly have happened as told here. And yet something surely did happen.