Author: Mihály Lakatos
As in Romanian cinema, there are few films in Hungarian cinema that reflect on the traumatic circumstances that followed the regime change. Béla Tarr’s epic masterpiece Sátántangó from 1994 or Fernec Török’s Moscow Square from 2001 have to be mentioned here. However, if we talk about the cultural visibility of the Hungarian Roma community, the trend is quite different from that in Romania. And this trend is mainly can be captured through popular music.
In Hungary even before the regime change the Roma musicians was appreciated members of the society and that tendency continued after the regime change too. One of the first highly successful musical groups to help popularise emerging urban popular music genres such as hip hop and R&B was the Fekete Vonat (yes, they named themselves after the notorious “black trains” mentioned in the first part of this article), made up entirely of Roma members.
In this way the popular music created a bonding point between the Roma minority and the majority before and after the regime change too. This tendency is still valid, if we think of popular musicians such as Caramel, Ibolya Oláh, Gigi Radics, Tamás Horváth or underground artists like 666Ghost.
(Note: in Romania the now verry popular music genre associated with the Roma, manele only became part of the mainstream in the 2010’s, before that it used to be surrounded by scorn and contempt).
The cultural representation of the Roma community through popular music was a foundation on which other cultural products could be built. We can mention the controversial reality show Győzike Show, starring Győző Gáspár who rose to fame as a member of the Roma pop group Romantic. The show is considered controversial because in addition to giving the country its first nationally known celebrity of Roma origin, Gáspár’s media image has greatly reinforced negative stereotypes about the Roma community (and now let’s not mention Gáspár’s new found relation with Hungary’s current right-wing populist government…). But we can also mention relevant cultural products like Áron Gauder’s and Erik Novák’s caricaturistic animated film The District! (Hungarian: Nyócker!). The film displays the Hungarian, Roma, Chinese and Arab dwellers and their alliances and conflicts in a humorous way, embedded into a fictive story of a few schoolchildren’s oil-making time-travel and a Romeo and Juliet-type love of a Roma guy towards a white girl (the main character, Ricsi Lakatos is voiced by the lead singer/rapper of Fekete Vonat, L.L. Junior).
However, a more tragic series of events also began in the 2000s which culminated in one of the most tragic and most outrageous events in post-socialist Hungary. The democratization of the political space also brought with it the emergence of far-right/nationalist parties (Hungarian Justice and Life Party, Jobbik) which were sometimes able to bring into the public space themes and modes of discourse that had disaster coded into them. And then disaster hit in the form of the 2008–2009 neo-Nazi murders of Roma in Hungary.
These events not just shocked the whole Hungarian society, but also completely (re)defined the discourse on the Roma community in Hungary and by this also the cultural representation of the community. There are one feature film and two documentaries that directly interpret the tragic events.
Benedek Fliegauf’s feature film Just the Wind (Hungarian: Csak a szél) from 2012 it’s a kind of poetic invoking of the events. The film’s fictious plot is inspired by the actual killings and it shows the murders through the point of view of the victims. Fliegauf analyzes the position of victimhood through a thriller narrative by giving glimpses of day-to-day struggles of the community facing systematic racism. The film creates an empathic atmosphere that is highly conducive to identification and which is relentlessly shattered by the gun shots of the faceless neo-Nazi murderers.
After the nationwide manhunt the perpetrators were arrested and the highly mediatized trial began. It lasted two and a half years, and the verdict was passed in August 2013. Eszter Hajdú’s 2013 documentary Judgment in Hungary (Hungarian: Ítélet Magyarországon) details the forensic trial of the four defendants whose prosecution hinges on internal pressure to force an investigation. Hajdú and her crew were the only ones who are attended and documented all 167 days of the trial. The crew not only recorded what happened in the courtroom, but also followed the whole process, from the inspection to the crime scenes, and interviewed the victims’ families, adding depth to the film’s already light subject matter. During the first few days and the last few days of the trial, there was a lot of international and Hungarian media interest, but the press did not attend the vast majority of the trial days. The mosaic of testimonies reveals a bewildering web of incompetent law enforcement, negligent forensic investigations and questionable witnesses, culminating in evidence that points to widespread national indifference, if not outright hostility. A close and devastating look at crime and punishment in Hungary. Hajdú’s documentary is actually a claustrophobic courtroom drama which not just uncovers different forms of systematic racism but also functions as a strong critique against the Hungarian juridical system, which forces traumatized victims to confront the aggressor. And here the situation is perhaps even more serious, because in addition to the overt racism of the aggressors, the covert racism of the judiciary and law enforcement is also imposed on the victims. Judgement in Hungary is a breathless, gut-wrenching drama about the most disgusting and cowardly serial killers of the post-regime change era, which also perfectly captures the zeitgeist.
Máté Fuch’s 2023 documentary Unprocessed (Hungarian: Feldolgozatlanul) can be seen as a kind of supplement to Hajdú’s documentary, because it discusses murders in a broader socio-cultural and socio-political context. Sociologists, political scientists, journalists and activists analyse the broader cultural context of the events, and these interviews are a cruel and harsh reminder that the tragic events have not really started a discourse and that there is a fear that the series of events could be repeated, especially in the current public and political conditions in Hungary.
The most recent movie that directly address the problematic situation of the Hungarian Roma community is Ádám Császi’s Three Thousand Numbered Pieces (Hungarian: Háromezer számozott darab) relased in 2022 (Császi’s first short film, tilted One Week also have to be mentioned here because it also addressed the topic in a form of a La Haine-tribute), a political, incisive, and innovative production infused with dark humor. Császi’s film is an urgent and powerful commentary on the injustice, prejudice, discrimination and racism directed against Roma, not only in Hungary, but also in the so-called liberal, progressive Western world. The protagonists (almost exclusively Roma actors) openly reveal their true identities and communicate unfiltered with the audience, breaking the fourth wall as they talk, shout, joke, lie, argue and express doubts. The narrative introduces characters such as Edmond, the musician and traffic warden who tries to clear his name in the face of unfounded accusations; Mario, the drug dealer who aspires to be a poet; Romeo, the professional dancer subjected to audience ridicule and domestic violence; Cristopher, the first gypsy paleontologist who tries to make a temporary fortune through brutality; and Silvia, who meets a menacing figure who threatens to sell her into prostitution in Romania. Despite their demoralization, exploitation, ridicule, criminalization and repulsion, the characters emerge as characters who share a common humanity with the audience. It is notable that the film avoids audience sympathy, and in doing so, facilitates an unconventional engagement with its subjects.
Actually, Three Thousand Numbered Pieces functions as a sharp critique directed toward covert and systematic racism. The movie questions the empty and superficial tolerant and inclusive attitudes towards the Roma community, but in the same time it also reconstructs stereotypical representations and didn’t tell anything new about the state of the Roma community. However, from a methodological point of view the production is verry forward-looking, as it was created by a creative group formed by Roma and non-Roma members.
As a conclusion perhaps we can say that the movies (and other cultural products) dealing with the Roma community, created after the fall of the Iron Curtain, both in Romania and Hungary further emphasised the victimisation of Roma. However, both in Hungary and in Romania emerged contents that could be great starting points of emancipatory aspirations. Maybe one day in the near future the Roma communities in Romania and Hungary will be able to create self-identified cultural content that will enter the global cultural bloodstream, but in the meantime, if the majority want to address the issue, I think they need to work with the Roma minority as equal creative partners.
CULTURAL TRAUMAS IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN SMALL NATIONAL CINEMAS 
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