Concept
'On Body and Soul' (dir. by Ildikó Enyedi, 2017) is a film about the growing connection between two lonely individuals. Their relationship begins with a spectral, spiritual, almost metaphysical bond formed through their shared dreams. Gradually, Endre and Mária, employees at a slaughterhouse, cross both emotional and physical boundaries, ultimately becoming united and confessing their love to one another.
The film is rich in visual parallels: slaughtered cattle and a free-roaming deer, the autistic Mária and the weary Endre, dreams and reality, salt and blood, a toy and a human being. In this way, the themes of the physical and the spiritual exist on two separate, non-intersecting planes throughout the film, and the only force capable of bridging these worlds is love.
'testről és lélekről' alternative poster series
The concept of the poster series is based on the intrusion of dreams into the protagonists’ everyday lives. The dream world functions as a secondary layer of reality, blurring and distracting from the tangible world. The series is divided into three parts: On Body, On Soul, and the central piece, On Body and Soul.
This duality is further expressed through color. Blue represents the spiritual realm and the atmosphere of the dreamscape itself, where the snow takes on a pale, ethereal hue. Red, by contrast, symbolizes the physical world: the blood from the slaughtered carcasses at the abattoir, as well as the wounds left by Mária’s shattered expectations.
The central poster is permeated with purple, a color created through the fusion of blue and red.
It embodies the union of the spiritual and the physical, reflecting the film’s core idea of body and soul becoming inseparable.
Poster series
poster series
'on soul' part
In On Soul, we see portraits of the two protagonists, who appear to be attempting to establish a silent dialogue. A significant detail is the deer’s eye, which symbolizes an accidental merging of two realities and marks the beginning of recognizing a kindred soul in an unfamiliar face.
'on body and soul', central poster
In On Body and Soul, body and soul finally converge. Here, the imagery of dreams becomes almost imperceptible. What remains is the intertwining of hands — a final physical manifestation of two souls coming together. After their first night together, Endre and Mária suddenly realize that they did not have the dream they had always shared.
'on body' part
In On Body, Mária is confronted with the painful experience of emotional rejection and the collapse of her expectations. The red palette evokes both the corporeal reality of the slaughterhouse and the wounds left by her first encounter with love. It marks the moment when she comes closest to surrendering herself to the dream world— to oblivion itself, —which, fortunately, does not come to pass by the end of the narrative.
details
