Budapest as you’ve never seen it: new film album brings the city’s lost past to life!

A remarkable new hybrid publication is offering a fresh perspective on Budapest, combining the tactile experience of a book with the immersive power of film. Short movies start automatically on a built-in screen, guiding viewers through vanished or dramatically transformed districts of the Hungarian capital.

The project features 25 short films, each between two and four minutes long, created from more than 700 archive photographs, most of them sourced from the renowned Fortepan collection. Rather than relying on artificial intelligence, the team at Animatiqua Studio painstakingly animated every image by hand to bring the past to life. The films were directed by András Kondacs, with narration by Gabriella Hámori in Hungarian and Rebecka Johnston in English.

A book that turns into cinema

Titled Budapest Filmbox, the unusual release sits somewhere between digital media and traditional publishing. At first glance, it looks like a book, but once opened, it transforms into a miniature cinema. The embedded screen automatically plays short films that take viewers through the city’s golden age, the period when Budapest evolved into a true world metropolis.

Rather than presenting a chronological history lesson, the films offer a form of visual memory: fragments of a city whose face has changed almost beyond recognition.

Lost districts and vanished landmarks

Most of the episodes focus on neighbourhoods and buildings that have disappeared or been radically altered. Among the featured locations are the elegant structure of the old Elizabeth Bridge (Erzsébet híd), the temporary pavilion city of the Millennium Exhibition, grand palace interiors from the turn of the century, and domes and roof ornaments that were never rebuilt after wartime damage.

The films also explore the phenomenon of the “scalped city”, the scars left by the Second World War and the 1956 revolution, as well as the industrial boom of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the long-standing rivalry between Budapest and Vienna. All of these themes circle a single question: what did the city’s golden age mean then, and what does it mean in today’s collective memory?