Taxidermia

• Taxidermia was Hungary's official submission for the Best Foreign Language Film category at the 79th Academy Awards (honoring 2006 films) — it was not nominated. (The candidate's claim that it was disqualified for missing the submission deadline is false and was dropped.)
• The film's budget was roughly HUF 500 million (about $2.4 million / €2 million at the time), financed as an international co-production between Hungary, Austria, and France — not Switzerland as originally stated.
• The extreme body transformations were built almost entirely with practical effects and prosthetics rather than CGI: actor Gábor Máté was fitted with a heavy fat suit to play the morbidly obese older Kalman in the film's final segment.
• Taxidermia premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, where its extreme body horror sharply divided critics and fueled festival debate over how far a film should push graphic content.
• The film's first two segments are adapted from short stories by Hungarian writer Lajos Parti Nagy, who also has a small on-screen role as the great-grandfather; the third segment, following the taxidermist grandson, was an original story co-written by director György Pálfi and his wife, Zsófia Ruttkay.

The three protagonists represent Hungary's three political eras: the orderly embodies the wartime fascist-regency collapse, the speed-eater channels Soviet-bloc consumerism and hollow spectacle, and the taxidermist is post-1989 neoliberal self-commodification. The body becomes the state.

The repeated motif of flight isn't metaphor. The orderly's winged fantasy, the eater's balloon-like body, and the taxidermist's suspended, self-stuffed corpse form a single doomed attempt to escape flesh through transformation. The curse is corporeality itself.

The taxidermist's self-preservation project is the only moment a character succeeds on his own terms, but it requires his death. Pálfi suggests the only way to defeat inherited degradation is to become your own object, freezing the cycle by removing yourself from it entirely.

Three generations of Hungarian men rot separately under the same cursed roof. A WWII army orderly loses himself in grotesque sexual fantasies and daydreams of flight while serving out a bleak posting at a remote outpost. His son grows up to become a competitive speed-eater, gorging for national glory during the Communist era until his body collapses into monstrous obesity. That son's own boy — lean, meticulous, obsessive — becomes a taxidermist who stuffs and mounts his father's corpse after the old man is killed by his own house cats, then turns the same tools and machinery on himself, mechanically eviscerating and preserving his own body as a final exhibit. Pálfi drags viewers through bodily fluids, flesh, and failure across decades of grotesque inheritance. Nobody escapes their bloodline.