Hungary,
1989, 45 min
Shown in 1992
CREDITS
- dir
-
Péter Forgács
- editor
-
Marta Revesz
- source
-
FMS Studio
-
COMMENTS
Shown with Private Hungary: Father and his Three Sons—The Bartos Family. Péter Forgács in person.
OTHER
Home movies are private moments captured for private remembrances. The lifetime of such domestic moviemaking is uncertain. But to Budapest-based filmmaker Péter Forgács, home movies are charged artifacts that give us vivid glimpses of the past. Embarking on an ambitious series called Private Hungary, Forgacs has gathered home movies from citizens of Budapest and refashioned them into elegiac portraits of a place and its inhabitants. These compelling works typically look at the now vanished bourgeois culture of the '30s and '40s and function as poetic ethnography. Distilling hours of home movies into lyrical reconstructions, Forgács subtly intervenes in the footage, reordering sequences, manipulating their duration, scoring them to buoyant music. Two episodes from the Private Hungary series have been selected for the Festival program. In Dusi and Jeno, the focus is on Jeno, a bank clerk with a filmmaker’s eye, who brings the city into sharp focus. While he and his wife, Dusi, cavort, Budapest stands mutely by, splendid one year, ravaged by war the next. There is lingering drama in Forgác’s Private Hungary, the drama of great histories revealed and simple lives re-enacted.
—Steve Seid
FACTOID #273
In 2006 the Festival widened its scope, screening films at seven satellite venues throughout the city including an arts venue (Intersection for the Arts), a pub (Edinburgh Castle) and a fire station (San Francisco Fire Station #7).
