HUNGARY: Oscar-winning director Istvan Szabo's new film opens Hungarian Film Week amid controversy over his revealed past as a communist-era informer

Record ID: 721225

  • Title: HUNGARY: Oscar-winning director Istvan Szabo's new film opens Hungarian Film Week amid controversy over his revealed past as a communist-era informer
  • Date: 9th February 2006
  • Summary: CLOSE UP SHOTS OF NEWSPAPER PAGES SHOWING PHOTOS OF SZABO BEING GREETED AND HUGGED BY HUNGARIAN PRIME MINISTER FERENC GYURCSANY; SCU STILL PHOTOGRAPH FROM 1956 SHOWING MAN SZABO ALLEGES TO HAVE HELPED (4 SHOTS)
  • Embargoed: 24th February 2006 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Hungary
  • Country: Hungary
  • Reuters ID: LVA5VLANLB07N3ASYB7P1O3MZL52
  • Story Text: Hungarian director Istvan Szabo's new film 'Rokonok' ('Relatives') opened the 37th Hungarian Film Week on Tuesday (January 31), amid controversy over his recently revealed past as a communist-era informer.
    Szabo, 67, director of the Oscar-winning film 'Mephisto', last week confirmed a story in a weekly journal claiming he had reported to the secret police on his fellow classmates at the Academy of Theatre and Film. Szabo spied and reported on fellow students between 1957 and 1963, historian Andras Gervai wrote for the literary journal ES.
    He was 19 years old when he began writing reports. By 1963, Szabo wrote 48 reports in all on people who were to become top names in Hungary's world of cinema.
    Szabo initially defended his past as an informer, claiming he meant to draw authorities' attention away from and save the life of a classmate, Pal Gabor, who took up arms against the communist regime during the revolution of 1956.
    But by Sunday evening (January 29), his story changed.
    Speaking on state television Szabo said it was really himself he wanted to save. Several historians have voiced their doubts over many elements of Szabo's story, some calling it a 'fairy-tale'.
    The Hungarian film world decided to give full support for Szabo. The premiere of his new film received strong applause at the festival. Set in 1927, 'Rokonok' is based on a novel about an honest young man who has been named attorney general in a small town and quickly discovers that everyone seems to need a favour and that corrupt officials are using his credibility for their own gain. Sandor Csanyi plays the lead role, whose performance in 2003's Kontroll, earned him international acclaim.
    As Szabo came on stage after the screening the festival audience, consisting mainly film industry colleagues and politicians, gave him a reassuring applause and support.
    "The artist and his private background must be separated, and these two should not be mixed. His reception tonight indicates that this did not happen," film director Sandor Gerebics said after the premiere.
    Even Hungary's Socialist prime minister, Ferenc Gyurcsany, demonstrated his support by greeting and hugging Szabo before the show.
    But historians continue to question and criticize Szabo's story.
    Janos Kenedi, who has been researching the secret service archives since the early 1990s, says that Szabo's story is simply a fairy-tale for children since no newly recruited informant could have saved someone who had fought in the 1956 revolution. Based on the reports of Szabo that were published in the journal ES last week, Kenedi reckons that Szabo's real task was to inform on fellow students who could potentially get involved in starting a new uprising in March 1957.
    For Kenedi, the morality of the issue is clear: "I think a work of art cannot give absolution from having betrayed others, from helping the political police influencing their personal lives, civil fate. There could be no excuse for this whatever good films Szabo may have done," Kenedi explained.
    Szabo's is the latest name in a steady drip of well-known Hungarians to be named as a spy, the most famous being Hungary's former Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy and Olympic soccer star Dezso Novak.
    Unlike other ex-communist countries such as Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Hungary has not revealed the names of secret police collaborators from the communist era. Attempts to pass a law that would open up all files have repeatedly failed over the past decade. According to Kenedi, one of the reasons for this is that the secret services managed to carry over much of their influence as well as unaccounted for finances from the previous regime.
    "The interests of the secret services today are much stronger than the civil society's demand for knowledge for the files and documents to be released and made accessible for the public, and so to help reach a catharsis, liberation that would be necessary to be able to face up the past and live together with the past in harmony with the present," Kenedi added.
    Another reason why such release has not happened in the Hungarian society, according to the historian, is that, unlike in other Central European countries, there was no real experience of freedom at the change of regime as there was no sharp divide between the softened goulash communism of the 1980s and the hard new democracy in the 1990s.
    ENDS.
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