In 2014, US filmmaker Connie Field was in Liberty Square in Budapest watching the Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, unveil a memorial for the victims of the Nazi occupation. By chance, she had a conversation with a young nurse, Nico. From that meeting, they became Facebook friends. Now, a decade later, Nico is one of three Hungarian female opponents of Orbán featured in Field’s rousing new documentary, Democracy Noir, screening in CPH:DOX and in contention for the FACT:AWARD.
The other two women are Timea Szabo, a diminutive but very courageous opposition politician, and Babette Oroszi, a highly respected and very hard-working anti-Orbán journalist, fuelled by caffeine and anger as she reports on yet more political skulduggery from the Hungarian leader.
Democracy Noir, produced by Sigrid Jonsson Dyekjær at Newen-backed Real Lava and through Field’s Clarity Films, won’t surprise anyone interested in European politics. The film chronicles just how cynically and effectively Orbán has used EU money to build his power base; how he has silenced media criticism and he how turned his government into a one-party state.
“One thing I tried to show in the film is that all of these [three female] characters were acting in their society in a way a democracy allows us to act and to affect their government – and none of it worked because Orbán had sewn up the system.”
The women do everything they can to loosen Orbán’s iron grip on power and that of his right-wing Fidesz party. Orbán’s opponents form a coalition against him. There are moments at which they enjoy a flickering of success but Orbán is far too formidable a political operator to be wrested from power without an almighty fight. Politicians at home and abroad decry his many offences against democracy and decency. What is he going to do next (one EU critic asks him), maybe start burning books? The question is a direct reference to Adolf Hitler.
This may be a surprising project for a US director like Field, whose previous credits include The Life and Times of Rosie The Riveter (1980), about US women during war work in the 1940s, and the Oscar-nominated Forever Activists (1990). However, the director’s husband is Hungarian. “We have been going to Hungary almost every year since 1990. We have been watching everything. That’s why I did it…he [the husband] was my walking history book and my translator throughout all of this. That’s why, because I had a very personal connection to it.”
The director also believes that this story will have a strong resonance for US audiences.
“Who I made it for was people like me, to scare them to death, so that in my country specifically we will work like mad to make sure that Trump doesn’t get into the White House. We have a very difficult situation facing us and I want the film to make people have a good look at what will happen if we don’t prevent it.”
Field isn’t expecting the documentary to change the minds of the many Hungarian people who continue to support and vote for Orbán. That would be like trying to convince a Trump supporter to switch sides. “They really live in a very different world to the one I do because of the information they consume.”
As the documentary reveals, Orbán spends lavishly (using EU funds) to boost his popularity with voters. He remains popular. Nico the nurse may spend her life campaigning against him but her own mother is one of his most fervent supporters. Field and her scientist husband themselves have close friends in Hungary who also back him. He taps into Hungarians’ nationalism. American right-wingers revere him too. The film shows many of them coming to Budapest for a conference where they all extol him as political visionary.
“Orbán is an interesting character. He’s very much an ideologue; he’s very much into leaving his imprint and ideology on the world,” Field observes.
Timea Szabo emerges in the film as a fearless and indomitable figure, always ready to stand up against Orbán at very high personal cost. “Well, this is not pejorative so please don’t read it wrong [but] Timea is a real attack dog. She really goes for the jugular and says everything exactly the way it is,” Field observes of the politician.
Orbán shares several traits with Russian president Vladimir Putin but, unlike Putin, he is not forced to lock up his opponents. “His control is so solid that he doesn’t have do that. He doesn’t arrest people who are protesting against him. It doesn’t bother him whatever Timea says – and as you can see in the film, Timea says it! They [his opponents] have no power.”
Like Putin, Orbán has various pet enemies he loves to harangue. In his case, Brussels and the EU are the bad guys. So is billionaire financier George Soros. “He needs to have boogie men to blame everything on.”
No, the director didn’t try to interview the Hungarian leader. She didn’t see the point. He features prominently – but through the archives. “He wouldn’t tell me, a western journalist, anything more than has [already] been captured on film all over the place.”
Field knew producer Dyekjær through Syrian film director Feras Fayyad. She had helped Fayyad when he was making Last Men in Aleppo (2017) while Dyekjær had produced his next film, The Cave (2019). The project had support from the Ford Foundation as well as from several European broadcasters.
The aim now is to launch an impact campaign so that Democracy Noir is seen widely across the US and especially in the swing states.
It’s not exactly a spoiler to point out the film ends on a downbeat note. Orbán remains in power. Nonetheless, the director insists there is cause for optimism. As she points out, last October, when Orbán usually has a huge rally in Budapest to mark the 1956 uprising, he was reduced to holding a far smaller event in the countryside while the streets of Budapest were “filled with people supporting the teachers’ strike.”
In the capital city, then, the great dictator isn’t having it all his own way…
