A scene from Benedek Fliegauf's 'Milky Way'. Photo by Viktoria Sovak, all rights reserved.

Hungarian cinema is going through a true artistic renaissance, and the landlocked country wedged in between Austria, Slovakia and Slovenia to the West, Kroatia and Serbia to the South and Romania and the Ukraine to the East is definitely one of the more experimental hot spots of European cinema of the last few years. The work of emerging directors such as György Pálfi, Szabolcs Hajdu, Ferenc Török, Roland Vranik, Nimród Antal, Gyula Nemes and Benedek Fliegauf has been touring the festivals and arthouses across the world. Antal (2003’s Kontroll) has been the commercially most successful and the Los Angeles-born director has just directed his first Hollywood feature Vacany with Kate Beckinsale and Luke Wilson, but the true visionaries, the renewers of Hungarian cinema are Pálfi (Hukkle, Taxidermia) and Fliegauf (Rengeteg/Forest, Dealer) whose films resemble Béla Tarr’s in that they dictate their own rules rather than follow established genre conventions. Fliegauf’s upcoming project is called Milky Way and is described by the director as an "ambient movie".

Paz Vega as Teresa of Ávila in 'Teresa, el cuerpo de Cristo' (Teresa: The Body of Christ) from director Ray Loriga. Photo (c): Lola Films, 2006. All rights reserved.

From the sex-starved and at least partly imagined title character in Julio Medem's 2001 hit film Lucía y el sexo (Sex And Lucia) to the very real 16th century feminist saint and title character in Ray Loriga’s Teresa, el cuerpo de Cristo (Teresa: The Body of Christ), Spanish actress Paz Vega certainly has a way of finding attention-grabbing subjects and projects for her to star in. In screenwriter-turned-director Loriga’s new film, which hits Spanish screens tomorrow (Friday), Vega plays Saint Teresa de Jesús, the Spanish nun-cum-saint and one of the three female doctors of the church who is perhaps better known in the English-speaking world as Teresa of Ávila.