Attila Kékesi: The Face of the Revolution
Subtitle: In Search of a Budapest Girl… Take a look at the photo and read this text presentation of the film taken from the IDF website, address below:
“The November 10th, issue of Paris Match in 1956 featured a report on the Hungarian revolution. The special coverage opened with a photograph taken on October 30, on Budapest Múzeum Boulevard. Forty-five years later, Hungarian historian Eszter Balázs and French journalist Phil Casoar decided to trace down the young couple seen in the picture. Who are they? Have they survived the revolution? If yes, is it possible to find them after all these years? The film follows their search for answers.”
And what a life, she had the Budapest girl, who fled Hungary, went to Switzerland and Germany to end up in Melbourne, Australia – as it is unfolded by the two researchers, who are in the picture and travel the world to find and talk to photographers and people who met Yutka, (real name Julianna Sponga), and who also found out that the young man, Gyuri, died even before the photo first appeared.
A reconstruction of a Life, that is what the film is, based upon one photo with several side stories built on basically the photographers who were in Budapest in 1956. Maybe the film does not give an overall perspective on what happened – but the filmmaker makes it important because of his stubborn insisting on finding out through the two researchers, and his characters. Yutka‘s husband in Australia talks, her son talks and gets to know something he did not know about his mother, who died in 1990 and whose ashes were thrown to the ocean. She did not want to be connected to one country, she was a citizen of the world, who fought for justice, a survivor, such a fun person, says her husband to the camera.
Hungary, 2001-2006, 71 mins.
