A single unanswered question, asked by the person who once seemed most certain of everything, drives this 2020 Hungarian drama into unusually careful territory about memory and desire.
What is Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time about?
Márta, a neurosurgeon in her forties, has built a respected career abroad, but she abandons it after falling suddenly and completely for a man she meets at a medical conference. She returns to Budapest to start a life with him, arriving at the bridge where they agreed to meet, only for him to appear as a stranger who insists they have never met at all. Rather than resolving that contradiction quickly, the film sits inside Márta's uncertainty, following her as she takes a position at the hospital where he works and tries to understand whether her memory has failed her or whether something else entirely is going on. Told with a restrained, clinical patience that echoes Márta's own profession, the story becomes as much about the reliability of feeling and perception as it is about romance.
About the cast
Natasa Stork plays Márta with a guarded, watchful stillness that keeps the audience uncertain right alongside her, while Viktor Bodó plays the man whose denial sets the story in motion. Benett Vilmányi, Andor Lukáts, and Zsolt Nagy round out the supporting cast in the hospital and social world Márta navigates as she tries to make sense of what happened.
Context & significance
Written and directed by Lili Horvát, the film unfolds largely in Budapest and draws on a European arthouse tradition that favors ambiguity over neat resolution, letting the audience sit with the same doubt that Márta herself cannot shake. Its premise, a professional woman upending a settled life for a connection she cannot fully explain, gives the film a quiet, adult intensity distinct from more conventional romantic dramas.
Watching Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time on Ktime
Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time streams on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, letting Farsi-speaking viewers follow its careful pacing however they prefer. Only a K-Time account with login is needed to start watching; the page can be browsed freely before that.