(MTI) - Bela Tarr said he had no other choice but dissociate himself from the interview published online on Saturday evening. "That writing is not in my style. I do not fight, debate or argue that way. I consider it very humiliating that all this has soiled the success and reception of our film, sinking it to the level of quotidian politics," Tarr said.
According to the online interview published by Tagesspiele, Tarr said he lived "in a country that is not free anymore". "Over the past 20 years, Hungary used to be a free country which made us happy, but now that's gone again," Tagesspiele reported Tarr as saying.
According to the interview, Tarr said Hungarian artists were protesting against the government's cultural policy, reflected in a letter of protest against the working conditions signed by Hungarian filmmakers and some forty colleagues based abroad.
The paper quoted Tarr as saying current events in Hungary would be described as a "cultural war" in Germany. "The government hates intellectuals because they are liberal and oppositional; it has insulted us as traitors," the paper reported Tarr as saying. State secretary for culture Geza Szocs told commercial news channel HirTV on Sunday that when he phoned Tarr to congratulate he had been assured that Tarr had not actually made the comments contained in the German interview. "He told me this with confidence, but I do not know whether he will ask for a correction," Szocs said. Tarr said the paper had attributed to him the direct opposite of what he said, Szocs added. "This has shocked Tarr and there is a rather hysterical atmosphere in Berlin," the state secretary said. "It is not true that Hungarian liberal intellectuals feel that their livelihoods are in danger," Szocs said.
