Imre Gyöngyössy, the poet and film director, who was an Artist of Merit, a laureate of the Balázs Béla Prize and the Cinema della Pace lifetime achievement award, as well as a nominee for the Oscar, was born 90 years ago. On this occasion, the National Film Archive has restored, with the support of the National Film Institute, some of the charismatic artist’s films, which are now shown in Budapest and seven Hungarian cities. The event series will be enriched by meet-the-artist occasions and a poster exhibition.
From the late 1970s, Gyöngyössy and his co-creators, Barna Kabay and Katalin Petényi, made films about people exiled from their homelands, divested of their human rights, working on different continents, from the forced labour camps of the Gulag and Kazakhstan to the South China Sea. His films were screened with great success at the world’s most prestigious international film festivals and were awarded prizes, but in his homeland he was for a long time in the crosshairs of the State Defence Services, and he was rehabilitated only in 1994, before his death. During his lifetime, his poems were published only in Italian. Also shown at the event will be Poem-film, which directors Petényi and Kabay based on Stigma, a new volume of poetry by Imre Gyöngyössy, recently published by Nap Kiadó.