13 - Frontlines: Migrants in Hungarian Documentaries in the 2010s

Summary

The refugee ‘crisis’ swept over Europe in 2015, resulting in a series of documentaries on the topic of migration in the continent and all over the world. The populist Hungarian government that has ruled the country since 2010 utilised the migration ‘crisis’ to boost its temporarily waning popularity by creating a demonic image of the refugee as the enemy of the country. As a result of the deliberate mishandling of mass migration, Hungary was one of the European countries where the flow of refugees congested and caused highly dramatic scenes in 2015. Despite the cinematic potential of these spectacular events and their impressive media coverage, no Hungarian documentaries thematised the turbulent events directly. In this chapter, I aim to provide an explanation of this telling absence and to analyse documentaries on migration and refugees before and after 2015. The overarching question is how have Hungarian documentary film-makers represented these issues in the recent xenophobic and openly anti-migration political climate, in which financial resources for socially critical documentaries are largely absent?

Freedom of expression in Hungary has gradually decreased since 2010, but some relatively independent financial support has remained available for a handful of documentary projects annually. Openly critical documentaries have not been banned yet as they were under state socialism, and their directors can operate in this underfinanced field of film-making, but government grants and television channels are cautious in their support. With regard to the complex and changing context of film production, I examine, first, the institutional background, secondly the representational strategies of Hungarian documentaries on refugees, and thirdly their reception in Hungarian society. I have two main theses concerning the film corpus under discussion. First, the emphasis of Hungarian documentaries shifted from the issue of integration into Hungarian society (2009–13) to the exploration of the physical methods and social psychological motifs of the exclusion of potential immigrants from Hungarian society (2013–17). Secondly, Hungarian documentaries have increasingly aligned the physical and ethnic boundaries between refugees and the majority of society with the increasing political and cultural gap within Hungarian society.