 |
| Márta Mészáros |
The Kossuth Prize-winning director, perhaps best known for her Diary series, described her childhood in the Soviet Union, where she lived from 1935, when she was four years old, until 1946. When she first arrived, Mészáros lived in a kind of colony of other foreigners, among them people from Poland, Germany and Spain, in Kyrgyzstan, where her father was commissioned to open an arts school. Her father disappeared in 1938, and it was not until 60 years later that Mészáros discovered, from the newly opened records of the former secret police, that he had been accused of spying and executed.
The young, orphaned Mészáros moved to Moscow after her father's disappearance and enrolled in the film academy.
Speaking about Hungarians' view of history, Mészáros said they are "prone to lie when speaking about some periods in the 20th century". While other countries in the region experienced periods of catharsis under the communist dictatorship, Hungary had just one such event, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, but it was brief, and it was followed by a complex period.
"The János Kádár regime was a much finer dictatorship than the Polish or the East German ones, but it also left much deeper consequences afterward: it ate peoples' souls, because a thin slice of the people gave up their friends and family for a better life," Mészáros said. She added that her new film would address this.
Hungary's problem is that there never was the kind of serious opposition to the government that could be found in places such as Poland, where 10 million people took to the streets in a single moment to protest the government, Mészáros said. The Kádár regime was fell softly, but Kadarism lives softly on, she added.
Source: Hungarian News Agency (MTI)
