PHOTOS: Orbán hails Hungarian film industry as new studio complex opens near Budapest

Film is art and industry at the same time, and while the art form is free, the film industry requires the state’s contribution to development, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said on Thursday at the opening of a new film studio complex of the Hungarian Film Institute in Fót near Budapest.

Orbán said filmmaking was in Hungarians’ blood. Hungarians had been present at the birth of Hollywood, when the first silent films came out, he said. He added that Hungarian filmmakers had set off to conquer the world in the first half of the 20th century, and during the second half of the century film “helped us tolerate the intolerable and say what was not allowed to be said”. He said that films made during Communism had also contributed to the fall of the Communist regime.

Orbán said the momentum was lost after the change of the regime, and the battle between “regime changers like us” and the “ancien régime” lasted for twenty years which “did not do good to Hungarian film”. He added that this was because the state also bore responsibility for the condition of the Hungarian film industry.

He said that the ill-fated film policies of the 2000s resulted in lost revenue of around 200 million dollars for Hungary. The formerly world-class Hungarian film infrastructure was allowed to deteriorate, and for a time Hungary fell off the map for global filmmaking, with other locations being chosen for international productions instead of Budapest.

Orbán said that the national government, however, did not accept this and found Andrew Vajna as a person who understood what made a modern film good and how lost skills could be repaired. He praised the work by Vajna, who acted as film commissioner until his death in 2019, stating that he had established the institutional system around the Hungarian Film Institute which was responsible for the renewal of Hungarian film and “without him, we would not have arrived where we are now”. Orbán said Vajna knew that film was art and industry at the same time.

He said that thanks to developments in the film industry, it currently attracts more than 100 billion forints in production spending. He added that even in the year of the pandemic, it generated 220 billion forints in revenue and currently spending registered in the industry exceeded 250 billion forints. Orbán noted the film industry employs more than 20,000 people.

Orbán said such world-class studios were available in Hungary as Korda, Origo and Stern, which enabled the country to become the most sought-after film production hub in Europe after London. He said the development in Fót had raised the Hungarian film industry to an even higher level, adding that the 42 billion forint investment was the all-time largest studio development project by the state.

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