___TRAVEL AGAINST THE PUBLIC INTEREST [KIUTAZÁSA KÖZÉRDEKET SÉRT]___Back
TRAVEL AGAINST THE PUBLIC INTEREST (in Hungarian)
A documentary film

This is a historical film. It dusts down some old concepts. Expressions like ‘red passport’, ‘blue passport’, ‘stamp for Yugoslavia’, ‘hard-currency quota’ and ‘travel abroad would go against the public interest’ call for footnotes these days. Soon even ‘defecting’ will need one as well.

This is a love story about how a relationship survived a gap of eight years. The boy failed to return from abroad and the girl was not allowed out of the country, not even to other socialist countries, because ‘travel abroad’ in her case would ‘go against the public interest.’

But it is a historical film after all, because about 450,000 people left Hungary for good between 1945 and 1989, which was many more than the number who left between the world wars.
On the other hand, it is a film with a personal tone, because there was a friend of ours filming in those days, in the early 1970s, so that the archive footage shows our faces, our friends and our Budapest.

 

Cast:
Krisztina Katona
Anna Koós
László Eörsi
László Béky
Zoltán Simon
Tibor Valuch
Sándor Striker

composer: Alton Watson, Tibor Szemző
editor: Kata Juhász
cameraman: Gábor Halász
director: Éva Pataki
producer: Eric Michel, Réka Sárközy

The film is 55 minutes in length.

The film was made by 1956-os KHT and the National Film Board of Canada., on behalf of the 1956 Institute, Budapest, with financial support from the Hungarian Historical Film Foundation, National Cultural Programm and the Nádasdy Foundation of Canada


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Copyright © 2000 National Széchényi Library 1956 Institute and Oral History Archive
Last updated:  Monday, 18-September-2006

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