Provincial Hungarian Town and Housing Estate, Late 1990s and Early 2000s

The unnamed provincial town and its housing estate form the starting and ending point of István’s life story. As a teenager he moves there with his mother into a modest flat, attends school, wanders the streets, and begins the relationship that leads to the stairwell death. The town contains small bars, a fountain, and apartment blocks that create a tight social environment in which privacy is rare and gossip spreads quickly. When he returns decades later and works in retail security, the same town has changed in detail but not in atmosphere, which reinforces the sense that his journey has looped back to its point of origin.

Youth Detention Center

The youth detention center is a remote institution where István serves his sentence after the neighbor’s death. It imposes an ordered routine of head...