The Witness

Stars: Ference Kallai, Zoltan Fabri. Suppressed by the Hungarian government for 12 years, The Witness is an often quite funny satire about a dike worker named Jozsef Pelikan (Ference Kallai) who is thrown into jail for illegally slaughtering a pig for his family to eat. Blackmailed into working for the government, Jozsef is given one managerial position after another (swimming pool director, fun house manager, etc.) which he consistently screws up because he doesn't understand the back-scratching policies of a severely bureaucratic Communist regime. Although a bit dated in its anti-Communist theme, The Witness is a clever satire on the "catch-22" quality of modern bureaucracies. Unfortunately, although the box cover claims that the video has "very clear English subtitles," they are very small (due, in part, to the serious letterboxing), and there are a few white-tablecloth-conversation affairs where the subtitling disappears completely. Audience: Foreign film fans would appreciate, but with as much as 10-15% of the subtitling unreadable, this is an unacceptable version.