Biography
Ildikó Enyedi was born on November 15, 1955, in Budapest, Hungary. She first studied business administration before turning to film directing, studying in both Budapest and Montpellier, France. Her feature film debut, "Mein 20. Jahrhundert" ("My 20th Century," HU/DE 1989), won the Caméra d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in France, an award for the best first feature. Her next film, "Magic Hunter" (HU/CH/FR 1994), was selected for the main competition at the Venice Film Festival in Italy.
In the following years, she continued to make feature and short films in Hungary, as well as the television series "Terápia" (2017), but did not replicate the early international attention of her first works. In 2012, she co-founded the European Cross Media Academy in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Enyedi made a major international comeback with the melodrama "On Body and Soul" (HU, 2017), a poetic story about outsiders. The film won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in Germany in 2017 and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film in 2018. Her adaptation of the novel "Die Geschichte meiner Frau" ("The Story of My Wife," DE/FR/IT/HU 2021) premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival.
Her latest film, "Silent Friend" (DE/FR/HU 2025), a poetic episodic film in which plants influence the lives of the characters, was selected for the main competition at the Venice Film Festival in 2025. It received several awards there, including the FIPRESCI Prize for best film and the CinemaSarà Award from the Cineteca di Milano, which honors films of exceptional artistic value and social relevance. The film was released in German cinemas in January 2026.