On Sunday, 21 June 2026 at 16.00, the Slovak-Hungarian feature documentary My Father’s Daughter (original title Apám lánya) had its festival screening at Kulturpark JOJ Cinema in the International Competition of Films from Central and Eastern Europe vying for the Blue Angel award. The seventy-seven-minute film by Slovak director of Hungarian nationality Lea Podhradská was born from her personal search for her half-sister, of whom she learned after twenty-seven years that she was alive. The Košice premiere was the film’s first showing before a Slovak-speaking audience. The introduction and the discussion after the film were given by the director together with cinematographer Krisztián Ollári.
For Lea Podhradská, the film began deeply personally. “Eight years ago I found out that my half-sister was alive — and I decided to find her. At first I had no intention of making any film, because nobody wants to put their own family in front of the public. But gradually I discovered so many small things that I had the feeling it was no longer just about me and my family — there was something bigger there,” the director explained. In her search she approached many relatives and each of them told her something different about her lost sister. “I felt that we were talking about one person, but I was hearing about ten different sisters. That diversity of characters led me, as a filmmaker, to say: maybe there is a film in this,” she added.
For someone who was at once director, sister and family member, making the film was a search for balance. “You play three roles at once: you are the director, you are the sister of the person you are looking for, and you are also a family member. What is good for the sister is not necessarily good for the director — and vice versa. The hardest part was deciding what, from what I had found, not to show at all. Finding someone after 27 years meant a waterfall of stories, often very unpleasant and tragic. I had to draw a line: this I can offer to the viewer, this I cannot. I believe viewers are not silly, and sometimes silence carries more meaning than words,” Podhradská said.
The film also gives its own place to Podhradská’s childhood imagination. “As a child I imagined that she was alive. I pictured her at the seaside, in beautiful dresses and high heels, in a yellow house — and around it there was always some little blue bird. This version of mine is brought into the film through animation,” the director said. To the other family members she gave space in the film to speak for themselves. “It was important to me that no one who took part in the film would ever regret being part of it. And sometimes it is stronger to let people simply sit in their own safe space than to add another cinematic layer of archive or animation,” she added.
During production, Podhradská was afraid the story was too personal and the audience would not identify with it. That fear was dispelled by the first screening in Budapest in front of about three hundred viewers. “There was a Q&A after the screening. The hall was completely dark, I was expecting questions about the film — and instead, people stood up and in the dark began to tell their own family stories. One woman talked and cried for more than a quarter of an hour. It was like a public family-constellation session — for three hundred people. That was when I understood that the film is not really about me or about my sister at all — it is about a more general problem of taboo and about how things in families are simply accepted, instead of being questioned,” she summed up. In her own family, however, nothing changed after the film — Podhradská admits: “I had expectations that after twenty-seven years we would finally open up the conversation. The truth is that everything continues as it was: whoever supported her still supports her, and whoever was against her stays against her.”
The Slovak festival screening was her first encounter with a Slovak-speaking audience. “I have always been curious how the film would be received outside the Hungarian-speaking environment. We come from the same cultural world but we speak different languages. The film is based on narration and the viewer has to read subtitles. I’m curious how it will sound at home,” Lea Podhradská said.
After this demanding personal film, Podhradská is now seeking rest in a different genre. “After this film I need a lot of fun. I have decided that my next project will be a comedy — I love absurd comedies. A year ago I came across a legend from a Hungarian village not far from Bratislava that fascinated me and would not let me sleep. It will be a fiction film with its own characters, conflict and dramaturgy,” the director revealed.
Cinematographer Krisztián Ollári prepared for My Father’s Daughter a visual strategy on the edge of documentary and staged photography. “You could say it’s a hybrid documentary — not the classic kind where we follow the protagonist and film what they do. It contains many photographically staged scenes, because we wanted the visuals to resemble an old photo album that the viewer leafs through and through which they can return to that family,” he said.
Combining documentary footage, animation and a family archive required a specific approach. “We worked with archives, but also with VHS cameras on which we shot ourselves — it wasn’t an archive, we were playing with it. Some shots were also animated; the main animation was done by an animator who connected the visuals with the footage we shot,” Ollári explained.
The most demanding part of filming was not the visual side for Ollári, but the approach to the family. “At the beginning we agreed with the director that we did not want talking heads — of course, we couldn’t avoid them completely, there are some forty or fifty of them in the film; the story itself required it. But for me as a cameraman the hardest part wasn’t the visual game but rather the psychological one: to enter the family in such a way that they would not feel there was someone with a camera behind them. Already during the research I tried to position myself so that they would perceive me more as a friend than as a cameraman,” he said.
Before the Slovak screening, Ollári had mixed feelings. “I’m curious about the reactions of the Slovak audience, when we already know how they reacted in Hungary. In a film with a heavy share of spoken word and subtitles, language becomes its own kind of barrier — we’ll see how the Slovak-speaking audience engages with it,” Krisztián Ollári added.
A repeat festival screening of My Father’s Daughter will take place on Wednesday, 24 June at 11.00 at Kino Veritas. The complete programme of the 32nd IFF Art Film Košice (19 – 25 June 2026), including the International Competition of Films from Central and Eastern Europe, can be found at aff.cinepass.sk.
The 32nd IFF ART FILM is being held with the support of:
Main organizer: ART FILM FEST s.r.o.
Co-organizers: City of Košice, K13 – Košice Cultural Centres, Visit Košice, ART FILM FEST, n.o.
With the financial support of: the Slovak Audiovisual Fund
The project was co-financed by the Košice Self-governing Region from the Terra Incognita program
Main partners: CODES Brand House, H2O FUND SICAV, Fors – stav
Automotive partner: AUTO-VALAS
Official hotel: Hotel Yasmin
Main media partners: TV JOJ, Pravda, Eurotelevízia
Sponsors: U. S. Steel Košice, ANTIK Telecom, Kino Úsmev, LOKO TRANS Media, CORE Labs, Technical University of Košice
Technological partners: NOV, ZEBRA, Deutsche Telekom Systems Solutions Slovakia, DELTA OnLine, ARICOMA, Datacomp
Official suppliers: DKC Veritas, PLOOM, DOMOS SLOVAKIA, Reštaurácia Contessa, Natura, Kinley, Budweiser Budvar, Julius Meinl
Official wine: KubBo Select, Ostrožovič
Media partners: JOJ play, JOJ 24, Film Europe Media Company, Rádio KOŠICE, Aktuality.sk, Forbes, Startitup.sk, Korzár, Slovenka, SITA, TASR, Mediaboard, AHOJ TV, See & Go, BigMedia, Kino Sterio, Košice City Guide, Košice V Skratke, MOJAkultura.sk, Česko-Slovenská filmová databáze – ČSFD, Filmsk.sk, diva.sk, koktejl.sk, zenskyweb.sk, Naše Košice
Partners: JOJ Cinema, Jojko, Slovak Film Institute, WITKOWITZ SLOVAKIA, DDDental, CK TUI ReiseCenter Slovensko, Wallonie-Bruxelles International.be, Taper, ECO Technologies, Aupark Shopping Center Košice, Košice Public Transport Company, Košice Airport, YumEarth, Rent2Eat, CPK Transport, iWish.sk, Kvety Garomi, Hair Factory Košice, Face up! Studio by Michaela Petroci, Panta Rhei, ARTFORUM, LOCAL NOMAD, East-Slovak Museum in Košice, MIHYRING
