The Hungarian title of Bálint Szimler’s debut feature is Fekete pont, the black mark a student collects for bad behavior until enough of them earn a punishment. Szimler likes that the phrase points two ways at once: it’s a system inside the school, and it’s a black mark on Hungarian society itself. Lesson Learned premiered in the Cineasti del Presente competition at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival and left with a Pardo for Best Performance and a Special Mention. It’s a school drama shot on 16mm about a transferred fifth-grader named Palkó and a young teacher, Juci, both newcomers colliding with an institution too rigid to bend. And it took Szimler fourteen years to make, for reasons that are themselves a story about systems.
Szimler is well placed to see the Hungarian classroom from the outside, because he was an outsider in it. He spent ages two to nine in the New York area, loving an American school full of gold stars and positive reinforcement, then came home to Hungary and the black-mark system and felt the cultural whiplash. That double exposure, two ways of treating a child, is the engine under the whole film.
The Fourteen-Year Gap
Szimler got into Hungary’s national film and theater university young, at nineteen, and made a student short, Here I Am, that played the Cinéfondation at Cannes in 2010 when he was twenty-two. Then came a long drought of fiction filmmaking, more than a decade, during which a planned feature was turned down by the Hungarian film fund and his old school was effectively dismantled in the state’s 2020 takeover of the institution, the one that triggered protests and pushed out faculty and students who resisted. The film fund and the university both bent toward the governing party’s agenda, toward national-hero pictures and away from anyone out of step with it.
That’s the system the title is really marking. And here’s the part worth stating plainly: the politics of Lesson Learned don’t live in a speech or a message. They live in the method. Szimler waited until he had a reason to make a film that wasn’t about himself.
If you’re focused more on the topic than yourself, that helps immensely.
He’s candid that his younger self wanted the opposite, a big first feature stuffed with every idea he had, the one that would announce his genius. The film he actually made is the inverse, and he says it feels more genuinely his for being less about him.
The Béla Tarr Inheritance
Ask Szimler about influences and he goes back to Family Nest, Béla Tarr’s 1979 debut, made when Tarr was barely out of his teens.
It’s a docufiction about a family crammed into a single apartment under communist housing policy, shot with non-professional actors playing people close to their own lives, handheld, direct sound, faces in punishing close-up. Tarr wasn’t interested in the housing problem as policy; he was interested in how a system warps the smallest human relationships, the marriage buckling inside the cramped flat. That’s the lineage Lesson Learned claims: a docufiction realism, in the tradition critics have compared to John Cassavetes, where the goal is that you never catch a single false moment.
Szimler builds that authenticity with mostly non-professional actors and a camera that refuses to lock down, handheld so the kids can move and stay kids, claustrophobic in the interiors and roving outside. He talks about wanting the audience to feel what it is to be a child, which is to live entirely in the moment, every experience total and then gone, and he ties that to 16mm itself: you capture a frame and it’s fixed forever, like the snapshots of relatives on a wall, the way a childhood moment lodges without your knowing which one will define you. The format isn’t nostalgia. It’s a theory of memory. He extends the same logic to the children’s performances: lock a kid into a precise mark and the truth drains out of the moment, so he and Rév built the scenes to let the young actors move and react freely, with the camera chasing them rather than the other way around. The improvisation that follows is why the film rarely holds a shot as long as Tarr would; the realism comes from responsiveness, not duration.
The closest contemporary cousin is Laurent Cantet’s The Class, which also turned a single school into a microcosm of a whole society’s tensions using a near-documentary method and non-actors. Where Cantet stayed neutral, Szimler is making a stand, but both understand that a classroom is the most efficient stage for showing how institutions shape people.
What He Took From Play
The other film Szimler keeps near is Ruben Östlund’s Play. He’s careful to say it wasn’t a direct inspiration for Lesson Learned, then immediately admits it probably was, without his noticing. Play dramatizes real Gothenburg court cases in which groups of boys robbed other children through an elaborate psychological game, and Östlund films it in long, static, coolly observed takes that make the viewer complicit in watching. What draws Szimler is partly the children and the group psychology, and partly the sheer mystery of the construction: he calls it the kind of film where he can’t work out how it was made, especially the performances. The same applies to Triangle of Sadness, where an extended take holds just long enough that you can’t name why it lands. For a director chasing realism, Östlund is the puzzle of a filmmaker who builds something rigorously artificial that reads as devastatingly true.
Limits as the Engine
Lesson Learned was funded independently, outside the state apparatus that had turned its back, and that constraint shaped the work for the better.
The limits can also be very inspiring.
Szimler’s argument is that you should stop reaching for what you don’t have and figure out what your actual limits can do, because a limit forces the first decision, and the first decision makes the next one easier. The handheld intimacy, the non-professional cast, the 16mm: none of these are compromises away from a glossier film he’d have preferred. They’re the film. This is where the form becomes the politics. A slick, expensively controlled movie about a punitive, rigid system would argue against itself. The loose, kid’s-eye, handheld docufiction is the rebellion the story is about, enacted in how it’s shot.
His collaborator on the look is cinematographer Marcel Rév, his film-school classmate, who has since shot Euphoria and The Idol. The two of them treat directing as the same problem from two sides: working with the actors, and finding the picture with the camera, then bending both to whatever reality on the day actually hands you.
For all the anger that finally pushed Szimler back into fiction after fourteen years, the conversation lands somewhere generous. He’s happiest that Locarno will carry the film, and its argument, far past where a Hungary-only release could reach, in front of programmers and audiences who’ll meet it on its own terms. He didn’t make Lesson Learned to prove he was a genius. He made it because the system finally gave him something worth saying, and a debut at fifty-something festivals’ worth of reach is how the lesson travels.
