With this turn of phrase, I am alluding to Ernő Szép's infamous introduction, who was a great Hungarian poet and writer born into a Jewish family in Transcarpathia, and whose brother was shot into the Danube by Hungarian Arrow Cross soldiers.Although he was only 60 years old, Ernő Szép was so shattered after the war that he wandered the streets of the capital as a shadow of his former self, half-blinded and crippled in body and soul. He introduced himself as "I used to be Ernő Szép".
One of my Greek Catholic priest grandfather's brothers, Uncle Sanyi, was detained for weeks in the 1950s by the State Security Service, the AVH, tortured every day, and then pushed out into the street at dawn, beaten to a pulp. I used to be Uncle Sanyi, he said.
My mother and her nine siblings almost starved to death in the 1950s when villagers, who were also destitute, risked their lives to smuggle baskets of food into the parish yard. At the risk of his family's safety, my grandfather baptized, buried, confessed and absolved the people of the village under the communist dictatorship. I used to be a priest, he might have said.
Don't think that this is over. Don't think it's just the ugly past, it's just history. The tyranny, the oppression, the exclusion, the crushing of human dignity, the slavery is much more present than you'd think. It rages, it lurks, it preys, it corrupts, every single day. Under the false pretense of freedom and democracy, the tyranny of a fearsome authority is wreaking havoc.
When I started making documentaries thirty years ago, my aim was to show the reality of what leads to the marginalization, exclusion and destruction of people, not as a one-off, random event, but as a chain of small discriminatory actions, a web of little lies, the fostering and institutionalization of vulgar ideas that can make the tragedy happen again and again.
It is not enough for a society to appear free and democratic, it must also work for its freedom, it must take care of it. We need to understand the complexity of the truth behind the black and white of reality. Where does it lead if we do not consider it our duty and do not defend with our laws the fundamental value that there can be no discrimination between one person and another. We cannot allow 'discrimination on grounds of race, color, gender, disability, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, wealth, birth or other status' when we talk about people's fundamental rights: that is, housing, equal quality education, social security, health care, equality before the law.
Where do we stand with this in Hungary today? Do all children get equal education? Do the elderly get a dignified old age as a thank you for working all their lives? Are the sick, the helpless, the destitute given support? So they can start again? So they can recover from their ailments?
What is reality? Today, the challenge is no longer just, as Attila József wrote in his poem, to "tell the truth, not just what is real". Today, it is no longer enough to reveal the truths that lie beneath the surface when showing reality. Today we not only fail to recognise the truth, we don't even know what is real! Today, reality is being falsified all around us! And we absorb this false reality with every breath we take, like oxygen, but it is poison. We breathe in the poisonous fumes of falsified facts, manipulated news, and faked history every day! And believe me, even those who know this are being poisoned by it.
When I travelled around the country with my camera, I was searching for truths that profoundly shaped reality. To show not symptoms, but the causes of phenomena. I was filming about poverty, about living as a minority, about the difficulties we face because we are different, or about our values resulting from our diversity. Today we also have to distinguish reality from pseudo-reality.
It is a fiction that immigrants are terrorists, but it is a reality that the challenges of migration must be addressed with integrity and humanity, and we speak the truth when we point out the causes and draw attention to our responsibility, to what we can and must do to ensure that as few people as possible lose their livelihoods, their homeland, their hope for a better life, in the place they were born, but also in the place where fate has cast them.
We have to understand that if we don't give a child a chance for a better life as a society, then it is our social, collective responsibility what they become, and we will pay the price. Isn't it better to pay at the beginning? Wouldn't it be better to strive, at government, community and individual level, to ensure that the children of all families receive an accessible, high-quality education and an appropriate, humane mental, spiritual and physical environment? Because if we don't pay for it, we will have to pay for the damage that results from its absence. We will pay for the care of people who are lost, sick, homeless, unable to work, unskilled, and perhaps even criminalized, through economic uncompetitiveness, and the collapse of care systems. Let's at least declare that the goal is not to have it so! That is why we are working, we want it to be different!
When I was a documentary filmmaker, I believed for a long time that my films were serving change.
But the gap between truth and reality was too great. In reality, my moving, powerful, socially critical films were celebrated by audiences, reviewed by journalists, praised by critics, debated by social scientists, and awarded by festivals. The truth is that nothing has been done to make a tangible difference.
It sounds a bit ridiculous and pretentious, but the fact is, I've been putting the camera down more and more, or handing it over to people I've filmed before, and instead of proclaiming solidarity and vocal social criticism, many of us have engaged in action. In the early 2000s, with the residents of a Roma settlement in Borsod, the Hétes settlement, and many volunteers who joined me from time to time, we achieved results in ten years that led to government programmes. And when, as a result of these government programmes, the initiative was snatched out of our hands, I set to work still in Ózd, to develop a social policy model, to build a system that proved, in another decade, that breaking the vicious circle of poverty and segregation is not just a utopia, but a reality. The 'You Belong!' system has enabled hundreds of children and young people from the slums and ghettos of Ózd to move forward on their development paths, to vocational training, secondary schools and many to universities. Meanwhile, the authoritarian system we live under, disguised as democracy, is increasingly working against these positive changes.
Now don't think I'm saying that we don't need documentaries. On the contrary. We need to show the reality and the truth more than ever! That is the task of the documentary filmmaker. These are the documentaries we need!
And it is up to you, the audience, after getting up from your seats in front of the screen, what happens inside you, to you, by you.
What and how you will do, after you have seen the reality and the truth underneath.
Will you choose blindness when you see the truth because you cannot bear to see it, or will you, with all the pain of seeing, set out to act, to engage in public policies, to take a role, to work to face our reality and prevent tragedy. Right here, right now.
I used to be a documentary filmmaker. What I saw and what I showed made me a different person, a person of action. Let us act for each other, so that we can all remain who we are, Humans.
Cover photo: Roland Pozsonyi
