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Goodbye Hungaria
Interview with the DirectorWhat is the history of the film? How did you come to this story and what inspired you to make the film? I was was actually traveling through Europe at the time half-heartedly making a film about traveling alone. I met Charu Newhouse, one of the main characters, in a youth hostel in Budapest. She had already been working at the Debrecen Refugee camp and was in Budapest to get some work done. When she explained to me the particular refugee situation in Hungary I was fascinated and decided to try to film in the camp. I met with various refugee and human rights organizations in Budapest to try to understand the background, and after a few weeks of waiting, I finally received permission to film inside the camp. It was Charu's dedication and motivation to take on the responsibilities that she did, that was my primary inspiration to make the film. When you were making the film, were there particular obstacles you encountered? While filming in the Refugee Camp, the everyday obstacles were of of a practical nature. I feared that I could get kicked out of the camp at any time. At one point I had filmed inside the quarantine by getting pulled through a secret hatch - and I thought the guards could have found out. I had a limited amount of tapes, I had no real production support or anyone underwriting the production, etc. But the biggest obstacle was in figuring out what the film was going to be about. While I was in the camp I wasn't sure of the best way to go about telling a story, or even whose story to tell. It wasn't until after my initial shooting that the real story began to emerge. I continued to shoot scenes for the film for well over a year - following the story from Debrecen, Hungary all the way to Brooklyn. Can you discuss your approach to making the film, e.g. interviewing, research, editing? I tried to keep the film intuitive. I wanted the viewer to really feel like they were experiencing the story as it happened. I filmed a limited number of interviews with people of authority but in the end none of that made it into the film. The interviews in the film with Charu and Abed were filmed in the moment and not staged afterwards. That feeling of immediacy is very important to the film. In the final scene at the World Trade Center that sense of 'being there' is subverted in a way because of everything that those towers represent now. Putting the viewer on top of the towers in the film's final moments often conjures up a complex set of emotions. As a filmmaker this final scene took a while to come to terms with. It was months after September, 2001 until I was able to sit down and watch that scene again. 
After making this film, have you changed your views about particular aspects of this situation or story? Refugees and Asylum-seekers are very rarely seen as full people in the mass media. The image that comes quickly to one's mind is that of the sad-faced refugee looking out from behind a makeshift fence, helplessly. For me, making this film has destroyed that stereotype. Each one of those faces is a real person with their own story to tell. Each one struggling to do what's best for them and their family. Each with dreams and desires as real and valid as anyone else's. The tendency to portray refugees as victims is too easy. Recently, I was reading a spread about the genocide in Darfur in Newsweek. The piece consisted of 4 or 5 pages of artistically shot Black and White photos of starving refugees, and about 100 words of text. Their victimization had been completely fetishized by the magazine. What are you working on now? I'm researching a film about the "Videofreex", one of this country's first video collectives. They were a group of young people who came together in 1969 by a convergence of technology and the anti-war movement. In a time when television was controlled by the big three networks, they saw the dawn of video as a chance for a new kind of media. And they lived this out - operating a pirate television station in a small town in the Catskills for years. In addition to their pioneering video work - their story mirrors that of the counter culture from Woodstock to the fracturing of the anti-war movement, to their own artists' collective that survived into the seventies. If someone wanted to know what they could do with regards to some of the issues raised in the film, what would you suggest they do? There are many NGOs that specialize in Refugee rights. Obviously, Human Rights Watch is one of them. There is also the UNHCR, Amnesty International, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, International Committee of the Red Cross, and others. --- If you would like to send Jon Nealon a question of you own, you can do so by emailing him at nealon@pipeline.com. |
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