A team dedicated to the past and present of the silver screen is helping to rebrand the city, 190 km northeast of Budapest by road, into a cultural center through its annual cinematic jamboree.

Now in its 22nd iteration, CineFest 2026 is screening some 100 movies, from full-length feature films to eight-minute shorts across nine days, starting today (Friday, Sep. 4).

Péter Muszatics, a film historian now in charge of CineFest’s “classics” section, joined the team in 2005, soon after its initial launch.

“It was still a quite small, countryside film festival, but from the very beginning we had a goal, an aim to make a major, mainstream international film festival in Miskolc,” he tells the Budapest Business Journal in an interview.

Not one to seize the limelight (and being from Budapest himself), Muszatics is quick to acknowledge the founding roles played by two “local patriots,” Tibor Bíró, the director of a local cinema, and Péter Madaras, a cultural manager, both based in Miskolc. “Cinefest is their child,” he says.

With a lot of hard work, the festival has expanded, and while it cannot compete with Cannes or other big names on the top festival circuit, it plays an important cinematic role in Hungary and the region.

Rare Screenings

Géza Csákvári, a journalist and long-time film critic, joined the CineFest team along with Muszatics. He is now the festival’s artistic director and is particularly proud of its success in screening films which are rarely, if ever, seen in Hungary.

“We now have a section called ‘V4+,’ because regional films are not distributed in cinemas here, so we don’t watch our friendly neighbors’ work at all,” he says.

In that spirit, this year’s festival opens with “The Wedding,” a Balkan comedy ranked the most successful Croatian film of all time. Others in this category include last year’s Slovenian box-office champion “Whites Wash at Ninety,” and “Three Days in September” by the acclaimed Romanian director Tudor Giurgiu.

The CineFest website describes the latter as a “Wild odyssey [which] follows a bride who discovers that her fiancé has been unfaithful. She abandons both him and the wedding party before drifting into a seaside resort town, where she is forced to confront her own life and decisions.”

In addition to a clutch of offerings from bigger countries such as the United States, France, and Germany, festival goers can sample works from Chile (“The Red Hangar,” set in the infamous Pinochet era), Mexico (“The Garden we Dreamed,” where a Haitian couple try to settle in a forest under threat of illegal logging gangs), and Japan (“Sheep in the Box,” a sci-fi featuring a couple who adopt a humanoid robot after losing their son).

Naturally, the largest segment of films, perhaps 30%, involves domestic productions. Both Csákvári and Muszatics are proud of CineFest’s premier screenings of Hungarian movies. These include modern classics such as “Külön Falka” (“Wild Roots”), by Hajni Kis, a 2021 production about a child attempting to reunite with her criminal father.

Explaining Everything

Then there is “Magyarázat Mindenre” (“Explanation for Everything”), a 2023 film featuring Ábel, a high school boy struggling to revise for his final exams because he’s dotty about Janka, a fellow student. Janka, in turn, is equally wowed by her married history teacher.

Amid this merry emotional confusion, we also have György, Ábel’s right-wing father, an embittered descendant of a once-aristocratic family who’s already had a bust-up with the history teacher, and a Transylvanian journalist more keen to make a name for herself than to report accurately.

“‘Explanation for Everything,’ Gabor Reisz’s film, premiered in Miskolc, just a few days after its [international] Venice premiere. It won best film in the Orizzonti [second-level] section,” says Muszatics.

Can CineFest climb to greater heights on the film festival ladder in a less-than-glamorous northeastern city with no airport? Funding has always been a restrictive issue, laments Csákvári.

It might help if local businesses showed some interest, but MOL’s petrochemical subsidiary TVK, Chinese-owned BorsodChem, and Hell energy drinks are noticeably absent from the CineFest sponsors’ list.

As for those directly affected, two Miskolc hotels, Fortuna and City, failed to respond to a request for a short comment on CineFest’s impact for this article: VisitMiskolc, the city’s official tourist office, proved equally unable to answer a simple email inquiry.

All films screened at CineFest will have English and Hungarian subtitles as necessary. Ticket prices are a standard HUF 1,400 (some events are free).

Scottish Oscar-winner to Pay Homage to Miskolc-born Antecedent

Miskolc rarely features at the top of national tourism attractions: in the minds of many Hungarians, the country’s second-largest city in the Socialist era is a symbol of heavy industry and 1990s rust-belt decay.

But for Péter Muszatics, the city and its surrounds are a treasure trove littered with the remains of cinema’s historical pioneers.

“Miskolc has very strong film roots: Emmeric (Imre) Pressburger was born there. He is one of the major figures in British cinema. Working with Michael Powell, the two produced, wrote and directed 16-17 feature films [in the 1940s and early 50s, a] very unique artistic collaboration,” he enthuses.

Then there are “Two great studio founders,” Adolf Zukor and William Fox, both born “very near Miskolc,” he continues.

This editorial was first published in the Budapest Business Journal print issue of September 4, 2026.