Full Description
In the rarefied world of chess, the true story of the Hungarian Polgár sisters has become the stuff of legend. Following the famed Cold War showdown between American Bobby Fischer and the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky, East Bloc children were actively encouraged to master the game. But Laszlo Polgár, the Budapest son of Auschwitz survivors, took the encouragement an obsessive step further. Believing every child to be a potential genius, Laszlo put his home-schooled young daughters, Zsuzsa, Sofia and Judit, through a rigorous eight- to ten-hour daily marathon of chess training. By night, Laszlo cataloged hundreds of thousands of winning game strategies on cardboard file cards for his daughters to analyze and commit to memory. Yet as the Polgár sisters began to astound the male-dominated chess scene with victory after victory, the Communist regime tried to clamp down on their rising fame. While the preteen girls were becoming the world’s top female players, Hungarian authorities confiscated the girls’ passports and considered placing Laszlo in a psychiatric hospital. First-time Israeli documentarian Yossi Aviram chronicles the Polgárs’ unbelievable journey from preschool champs in the smoky gaming clubs of Budapest to Judit’s defining match against her idol, Garry Kasparov, the master who once claimed that women chess players should instead focus their energies on raising children.
