1 is the first feature film of Hungarian director/production designer Pater Sparrow. It was inspired by One Human Minute by Polish science fiction writer Stanisà Âaw Lem, a work of pseudepigrapha.
A bookshop renowned for its rare works is mysteriously filled with copies of a book entitled 1, which doesn't appear to have a publisher or author. The strange almanac is filled with tables and statistics that describe everything that happens in the world in the course of one minute. A police investigation begins and the bookshop staff, along with a mysterious visitor from Vatican City who arrived just as the book did, are placed in solitary confinement by the Bureau for Paranormal Research (RDI - Reality Defense Institute). As the investigation progresses, the situation becomes more complex and the book increasingly well known, raising numerous controversies. Slowly, the lead investigator, Phil Pitch, begins to lose his grip on reality.
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Anton Bitel of Sight & Sound wrote: 'Enigmatic in form, encyclopedic in scope, and leaving room between its lines for many different readings, Sparrow's truly singular film encapsulates the whole of human experience in eccentric, elliptical cross-section. It is all at once science fiction, political allegory, transcendental mystery and free-form documentary, recalling the early works of Peter Greenaway in its vast referential breadth, its mannered blurring of fact and fiction, and the beauty of its tableau-like images.' Valuska László of Index praised the cinematography and the performances of Mácsai, Czukor, Kerekes, Haumann, Rogacewicz and Musci. Joshua Chaplinsky ScreenAnarchy opined that while the film is "packed to the gills with ideas", it "fails to develop any of them in a satisfying manner."